Chapter Text
“Tim?” when he tries to spot her it’s like she’s always just on the edge of his vision. When he moves, turns, so does she, always out of sight, always just out of reach.
The lakeside is quiet and the thick fog covers everything. Tim feels like he’s alone on an island. Beyond the fog the ground stops, becomes nothing. He’s afraid to move forwards. If the world suddenly ends, he doesn’t know what he’ll fall into.
“Tim,” she calls again and he turns, catches a glimpse of thick dark hair. “Will you come with me?”
He feels small and much younger than twelve. He’s cold and somewhere out in the fog something is moving. He can hear it huff as it breathes, hear it grunt. He can sense it’s hunger, it’s anger. It’s not a good something. It’s the kind that will rip and tear. It’s come for Meredith. He knows that but he can’t find her to protect her.
“Tim, will you come with me?”
He reels as a shade flits by him once again.
Out in the fog the monster is screaming.
Tim Gutterson ran. His chest burned around every breath and sweat ran down over every inch of his skin. His eyes burned, his muscles ached and cried out for peace, for rest but he ignored them. His feet slapped in time with his breath, the impact juddering up through his legs, his body, rattling his skull a little but he paid it no mind.
He was home. The streets of Foggy Lakes were beginning to glow gold as the sun sank behind the horizon and the outdoor lights and street lamps began to glow to life. After a pre-dawn to the long arduous drive home, Tim and Raylan Givens had been mentally and physically drained. They had checked into their motel room, fallen into their respective narrow beds and slept like the dead.
At least until Tim was woken by a strange and unpleasant dream about Meredith Rodham. He woke filled with uncomfortable fidgety energy, his head thick and addled. He had changed into running gear and headed into the night, hoping to catch the air cooling down, but it was only getting warmer. Still, he ran. He wondered if it might storm, hoped it would to clean out the dry and sticky air, wash away some of the dust.
As he ran he noted the changes that had come to his home town. Some money had found its way in and it showed in the renovated store fronts, the franchises cropping up around the slowly expanding streets. Tim ran past a funky vintage store, recalled it’s days as a dusty thrift store where Tim would dig through boxes in the hope of finding old comics or cool old sci-fi books, the library where he first found a copy of ‘Dune’ and had his pre-teen mind absolutely and permanently blown. The building had been renovated, modernised. Signs promised free internet, free wi-fi, a franchised coffee kiosk.
The bowling alley where his dad spent half his life getting hammered had gotten a family friendly make over, promised discounts for kids and birthday parties. Tim remembered it having the cheapest bar in town and a happy ‘hour’ that ran from 7 til 10. It was the starter bar for the town residents looking to get dangerously drunk at as little cost as they could. Now it promised a free cake for your kids birthday, shaped like the toy of their choice.
The ache and tightness in his legs was such that he knew he would have to stop soon, turn back, take some manner of a break, but he pushed on. He passed a diner where his father, in rare burst of good nature would take them to indulge in greasy burgers, fries and shakes. It had been cleaned up, shined up nice, brighter paint on the walls, better lighting and a menu that offered a vegetarian option. It was open, the lights on, the clientele inside laughing and chatting as they spoke. Tim saw a sign offering take out, made a mental note.
A new plaza had been built on the site of the town hall fire. The centuries old pine building had been burned to ash one Halloween when Tim was six years old. He was dressed up as a soldier and the school was taking a group of school children out trick or treating when they first smelled the burning wood and saw the orange glow on the night sky. They had run to look and watched the roaring flames eat the wood away to nothing, embers racing for the sky like fireflies who knew something humans didn’t.
The new plaza had grass and trees, comfortable benches and vintage street lamps to light it up, keep it safe. A few people walked around, sat on the grass, enjoying the last warm dark night. A group of teenagers hung out on one such bench, talking and sharing a joint that Tim could smell as he jogged past. They watched him calmly, as relaxed as everyone else in the park, or more so, in honesty.
The humidity was rising and for the first time Tim seriously considered stopping. He hadn’t eaten or drunk anything like enough to have run this far and fast. But every time he slowed down he saw Meredith and the clawing discomfort of anxiety that was coiling in his gut would flare up, send a jolt of something through his nervous system.
He tried to push through the flat, dull weakness flooding his legs, the feeling he had run through even his fumes.
He slowed down and he thought of Meredith Rodham. Gorge rose in his throat and without getting a say in the matter he doubled over and started to be sick.
++
Deputy US Marshal Raylan Givens felt like his head was both filled with and coated in cotton wool and when he realised Tim Gutterson had left their shared motel room, the mans bed empty and unmade, his sense of confusion doubled down.
He stumbled to the bathroom, into the shower and after a ten seconds of ice cold and ten minutes of nearly scalding hot water he was wide awake and could recall pertinent facts, like who in the hell he was, why he was in an unfamiliar motel room and stirring awake at almost nine at night.
He dried off and dressed as he got finished doing both he heard a knock at the door to the room and opened it to Tim Gutterson, uncomfortably pale and dripping with sweat. He wore joggers and a hoodie, had headphones slung around his shoulders, carrying a paper bag that smelled of burgers in one hand, and a bag of beers and bourbon in the other.
Tim walked in and crossed to the small breakfast table and laid the bags down. “Both are a quarter pounder and large fries,” Tim told him.
He said nothing else, disappeared into the bathroom and Raylan heard the shower start up. He had questions, but without thinking too much about it he found he was heading for the table, reaching for a burger and digging in. The burger was pretty damn good, tender juicy meat wrapped in a semi sweet bun, piled high with fried onions and crisp lettuce. The fries were crisped to perfection and the beer, some local brew Raylan didn’t recognise wasn’t Raylan’s favourite but it was cool and went perfectly with the meal.
When Tim emerged from the bathroom some time later, he wore his sweat pants but had draped his towel over his shoulders rather than put his soiled shirt back on, flashing his torso, slender, decently toned which wasn’t a surprise for a former Ranger. He had a cursive L tattoed on his chest, a decent collection of scars, small and large that Raylan glimpsed at, then away from. He had seen them before, but they still drew his eye.
Tim crossed to an overnight bag on the end of his bed, digging around until he found a plain t-shirt to pull over his head and while he ruffled his hair with the towel to take out the worst of the water Raylan got a look at more scars on Tim’s back. He spotted a cluster of bullet wounds under Tim’s left shoulder blade that corresponded with a cluster of exit wounds on his front. There was what looked like a patch of burned skin on the back of his right bicep and a jagged network of angry red lines on his right hip, half concealed under the hem of his joggers.
He looked away, curious about each one but not sure it was right to ask. But he found himself looking back at the cluster of bullet wounds. He wasn’t sure he understood how Tim had survived such a wound.
Tim, being Tim, being a former sniper for the Rangers, had a preternatural sense he was being watched and turned, caught Raylan staring at the family of bullet wounds. “You want to ask how they happened?” he asked in his typical level drawl, pulling a t-shirt on.
“Sorry,” Raylan looked away, felt like a dick for staring.
“I don’t mind,” Tim took his seat at the table and unwrapped his food, broke open a beer and took a long dram.
Raylan frowned, suspicious of Tim’s open attitude. Tim didn’t exactly go out of his way to maintain his personal privacy but he certainly didn’t share a lot about himself, ever, at any time since Raylan had met him.
“We’re in my home town. My ‘aloof badass’ routine is blown all to shit,” Tim pointed out.
Raylan laughed, nodding. "It is," he agreed.
Tim waited patiently while Raylan worked out what he wanted to know.
“Mostly I want to know how the hell you’re alive,” Raylan said. He motioned to his own torso in the same location as the cluster of bullet wounds, “this…looks like it was...bad.”
“It was,” Tim agreed.
Raylan waited for the story but Tim had started on his burger and fries and seemed content to work on them a little while so Raylan joined him. After a while, Tim drew on his beer again, washing down his food before he started to speak. “I was on a mountain side doing shit I can’t tell you about, but that involved shooting bad guys. Kid gets behind me, all of seventeen and he fires this 30 year old handgun into my back. Breaks some ribs, nicks a lung. Bled everywhere.”
“Jesus,” Raylan breathed. “How did you walk away from that?”
Tim shrugged, “I didn’t know I was shot at first. Medics said it was probably shock, adrenaline.”
“What happened to him? Kid who shot you?” Raylan asked.
He regretted it at once. Tim looked like he hadn’t expected the question and he chewed the inside of his mouth. “I had to kill him,” he said quietly.
Raylan fought not to sit in totally shocked silence. “How old were you?” he asked.
“About a week off’ve twenty,” Tim told him.
Raylan shook his head, felt angry and a little sad at the same time. “Pretty clear cut case of self-defence,” he said calmly, and Tim nodded.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Still…sucked.” The final word was uttered with far more conviction and depth of meaning than you normally heard applied.
Raylan nodded. He knew what the simple expression was trying to say. Tim wasn’t someone who wanted to kill people, certainly not someone who had gone to war with that specific goal. He absolutely wasn’t someone who went to war to kill teenagers. His guilt about the act was obvious. His quiet process of locking it back away was more subtle, his expression closing off in small and careful ways.
They finished their food, their first beers, broke into their second each. “So, how’d you get out of it?” Raylan finally asked.
Tim blinked, remembered he hadn’t finished his story. “I don’t know. I’m told I dropped off comms sometime after the air strike finished my job for me. They came looking for me and I’d crawled halfway down the mountain before I passed out.”
“We got a badass over here,” Raylan teased and Tim grinned, nodded.
“I was a little proud of that part,” he admitted.
Raylan drew on his beer and glanced around the stuffy room, detected a stuffiness to the air.
“Wanna get out?” he asked.
Tim raised his eyes from the table top, looked half surprised. “You make a habit of going out drinkin’ in Harlan?” he asked.
Raylan thought about it. “Kinda.”
Tim laughed, but he was shaking his head no.
Raylan leant forwards, “Hear me out; we’re running out of alcohol.”
“We can buy more of that from a store,” Tim countered.
Raylan let out a small groan. “You got to go out for a jog,” he said. “You’ve walked all over, you’ve been in my house.”
“Nothin’ stopping you runnin’,” Tim reminded him. “I can draw you a route.”
Raylan sat in silence and let himself radiate sullenness. He pouted, slouched, sank down in his chair and generally made a big show of being bored.
Tim was watching the display, eyes lit with amusement. Raylan played it out a little longer before giving up and just staring directly at Tim.
“This gonna go on all night?” the younger man asked.
Raylan nodded. Tim rolled his eyes. “You can’t wear the hat,” He eyed Raylan’s trademark Stetson that rested atop the bed Raylan had slept in.
“Deal” Raylan said. He liked his hat but this kind of clammy weather made it uncomfortable anyway.
Tim took a deep breath and slowly nodded. “Fine. Anything at all happens, it’s on you.”