the_cupbearer | psl for Raylan: post-shootout

Raylan ran on full adrenaline in these kind of moments, eyes sharp and focused and burning with a quiet rage at the sight of Ganymede held at gun point. He moved quickly, shooting two guys before getting Ganymede save behind him and dealing with the third. All that mattered after the guys were dead was that there was no one else hiding in the wings, followed swiftly by him pulling out his phone as he comes back to check that Ganymede was okay.

After that, it was phone calls and cops and the EMTs. It was statements and waving off his own EMT check as he makes his way over to the lean man.

"Hey. They treatin' you right over here?"

The EMT gives Raylan a wry look but keeps working.

Ganymede was right, there was a concerned earful coming, but not in front of God and everyone. That was a 'when they were driving home' kinda conversation.

"Oh, I've been better," Ganymede manages with a grimace at another swipe of antiseptic, muscles down his side twitching. "I'm trying to avoid stitches, though."

The EMT gave Ganymede a look he understood all too well: one that meant his desired outcome was not likely. The graze was deep enough to be consistently bleeding, though he was in no danger of bleeding out or losing more than he had already. "Might be a little slow at work in the next couple days. No hard shaking for me." He worked at a bar, one that did coffee and things in the morning and afternoons as well as mixed drinks and the more popular beer in the evenings. "Ow, fuck, that stings," he hisses when the EMT pulled gently on the edge of the wound.

"You alright?" Not just physically, but he had needed to shoot several people who were now dead.

"I'm fine." Like a kick of the leg when a Doctor hit that specific muscle, the response was automatic and well practiced. If Raylan were capable of expressing how not fine he was, he might, but only in private. No one else would know about the nightmares of watching men die in horrible ways that haunted him some nights, the ones that got him up and out of bed and back to work so he didn't have to think about it.

"No haulin' shit up from the basement either. They can get someone else to do it or I'll come by and do it myself." Don't put it past him. "You think you'll be goin' to the hospital?"

The EMT looks back up at Ganymede expectantly. They couldn't make him do anything he didn't want to do, but the EMT knew what should happen.

Ganymede gave Raylan a look for the immediate answer, quiet and easy to miss if you didn't know it was there, but Raylan had seen it enough. They'd be talking about that later, most certainly. He sighed when the EMT looked back up at him, and though he was well aware he wouldn't die from the raw wound along his ribs...he didn't relish the idea of leaving it untreated for as long as it would take to heal.

"Can I get a ride home if I do?" he asked. It wouldn't take long; he'd gotten stitches before, many, many times. If he thought his needlework was decent he'd have done it himself. "I feel fairly confident that if I've got the stitches to show for this, I won't be barbacking. Coffee service it is for me, it seems."

An hour later, with his side properly sewn closed and covered with a pristine bandage, Ganymede leaned into Raylan with a soft hum, tucking the prescription into his pocket. "Talk to me, honey." It went unspoken that whatever Raylan said wouldn't leave the car; Ganymede understood that he was intensely personal and bottled up his responses to most emotions.

"Course you can," he promises, eventually following behind the ambulance and waiting in the waiting room until Ganymede was released to him and securely next to him, where Raylan ferries him out carefully to the car. He had done nothing put replay the situation in his head over and over as he'd waited for Ganymede to be released, looking for any aspect where he could have done something differently, where he should have seen this coming or should have known - but the agonizing was for Ganymede being hurt instead of the men Raylan had killed.

"Talk to ya about what?" The ask comes gently as he turns over the engine and starts pulling them out of the hospital parking lot. "I figured you would want me to save my speeches on how to not get into that situation until at least tomorrow. After you've gotten some rest, but if you want me to dig in now.."

There was a playful undertone to the trailing off of his sentence, giving Ganymede all the time in the world to stop him.

"You know I do," Ganymede chuckled, taking the time for interruption and shaking his head gently. "Dig into me all you want, Raylan. And once you've done that, we can talk about the rest of what happened today." Like the fact that his friend-sometime-lover shot two people and is human, and emotions will result. Emotions Raylan historically does not deal well with. Ganymede, however, is, and he has all the patience in the world for it.

He reached over and brushed his fingertips over Raylan's wrist, trailing up his forearm affectionately and intending it to support his friend with no pressure exerted. He knew the impulse to bottle everything up, he'd done it before himself and it never really ended well. "You know I'll be fine--got all my shots and everything, and it doesn't hurt that much." The bullet graze hurt, there was no erasing that just yet, but it was hardly debilitating.

Not that he wouldn't tease about it being agonizing and rendering him helpless if it made Raylan laugh.

"I hope I at least get a kiss out of it after the lecture."

The wrist closest to Ganymede was relinquished to settle on his leg as the Marshal drove, smirking at the start of Ganymede's first statement, but it fell a little at the promise that he expected to hear something about Raylan's shooting. It wasn't something he generally talked about with anyone except his whiskey bottle.

Ganymede's voice was always soothing though and Raylan let his ears indulge, smiling again at the soft tease and glancing over.

"More than if you're well behaved for it." He takes and lets a deep breath out of his nose. "You wanna tell me how you found yourself cut and held hostage? We know they weren't tryin' to rob the bar, all four hundred and somethin' that was left in the til. So what were they after?"

Ganymede knew exactly how well the prospect of talking about the shooting was likely to go, but he was implacable in the face of that falling smile. He twisted their hands, fingers slotting in between each other as Ganymede's thumb trailed gently over Raylan's knuckles. Each ridge and valley of bone and skin was familiar, and the motion soothed him gently, providing more comfort than any of the efforts the EMTs had gone to.

"You know I can behave if I have incentives," he murmured, teasing just a little. They'd teased around the concept before, once or twice; he trusted Raylan to remember. Though at the following questions Ganymede merely shook his head. "One of the girls--one of the new hires, I don't know her very well. She'd been tangled up with some boy, a real idiot by the looks of him, and apparently it ended badly. I didn't know how badly, but she requested a shift change, presumably to get away from him. His friends took issue with that, it appears."

He sighed it out, pushing his free hand over his hair away from his face. "I hope you can understand why I wasn't going to hand anyone else into that."

Oh, Raylan remembers, faint smile pulling again with a bounce of his eyebrows and a glance over at the seemingly younger man. As much as he might be happy to take that easy road out, he had a feeling that Ganymede wouldn't let him escape the topic so easily. Part of him saw it for what it was, someone who cared for him, trying to help him vent something that absolutely was getting pent up as it always was. The other parts wondered if Raylan would be able to accomplish that seemingly simple, secretly complex task.

He's silent for a long moment, humming a note with a faint nod at G's explanation.

"We need to get you up to speed on how to disarm someone when you're that close. The options that are available, the ways you can.. stop this kind of thing from happenin' in the future, the next time you decide to be a stand up gentleman."

Of which Ganymede was, an absolute gentleman that Raylan struggled to imagine being violent, which meant everyone else would struggle too. He would feel better if Ganymede was able to defend himself. When he had to.

Ganymede listens, to his credit, and only lets out a very faint sigh when Raylan tells him that about disarming someone. If it were any other day, any day where he hadn't been treated for the last two and a half hours like he was some kind of stupid boy who'd gotten himself hurt by being foolish, he'd have swallowed the comment that tumbled out of his mouth without further thought. Any other day and he'd have kept the illusion intact of him being utterly normal, albeit youthful-looking.

But today was not any other day. Maybe it was a mark of how comfortable he felt around Raylan, given how he knew the other man was about his work; there would be every attempt given to de-escalate, but once violence was the only good option left, it would be the last one. It was a attitude Ganymede happened to share, though his fuse was significantly longer than most people's, and he knew that about himself. Largely it was part and parcel of what he'd been made and the long intervening years of his life.

"If it had been only me I'd have killed him and been done with it." But it hadn't been only him, and Ganymede was if nothing else aware enough that he was not a gun guy. He hadn't wanted anyone else to be hurt through his misadventure or miscalculation, especially someone for whom the wound would be much more of a problem.

Edited 2024-08-14 18:13 (UTC)

"There's still things that can be done," Raylan replies softly, glancing over from the road. "That's all I'm sayin'."

God he couldn't wait to get a drink.

"How would you have done it? Killed him, if it were just you."

"It only takes sixty-six pounds of torque to disrupt the spinal cord," he says equally gently, through he doesn't look back over at Raylan just yet. "He might have gotten a shot off before I could either stab him or break his neck. But it's unlikely I'd have died."

Extremely unlikely he'd have stayed dead either way. "I told you once I don't favor guns, and I was truthful. But it doesn't mean I am incapable of violence." He knew very well Raylan struggled to see him as anyone who could do harm, and Ganymede can't fault his friend that. But he is very, very tired of having to maintain that illusion at all costs.

"Are we going to your place, or mine?" he asks finally, after a moment of quiet between them.

Raylan didn't struggle at all in seeing Ganymede as someone who could be violent, only that he hadn't seen it yet and there was always the question of where the Line was. And how bad it might be if someone crossed it. That was the real nugget of golden truth, for any man.

"Mine." Safer there. Ganymede could go to his apartment tomorrow if he felt comfortable doing so, but for at least 24 hours, Raylan wanted him somewhere secure. He had questions about was G had just said, 'unlikely I'd have died', but it was a conversation that could wait until they were behind closed doors and comfortable. With a whiskey and the bulk of the terrible day behind them.

It didn't take him long to get to his hotel room, the one he'd chosen to stay in for the past two years, and get them inside, locking the door behind them and taking off his gun to toss on the dresser with a sigh.

"You want a drink?"

"God, yes," Ganymede sighed, shoving a hand over his hair as he relaxed the moment the door was shut. "Though I'll tell you for nothing, I have better booze at my place. For next time."

He sat down heavily on the end corner of the bed, face twitching when the motion pulled at his stitches uncomfortably, making him rub his hand over the bullet track. It sucked, and it would hurt, but he could feel the skin and muscle slowly beginning to knit back together. "But before that...come here for a minute. Please?"

"I know you do." Of course he did. He gave more of a damn about it than Raylan did. All Raylan needed was a bottle of Jim Beam and it was the only thing he ever stocked. If he stocked more, if he stocked better - he might have to look at if he's an alcoholic and no one wants to do that.

His hat is deposited on top of his gun and he doesn't hesitate in angling his stride over to stand in front of his lover. A hand comes up to cup his face.

"I'm glad you're okay," he says with a deep, serious sincerity. "I heard you'd gotten shot and all I saw was red."

"I didn't intend to get shot at all." He hadn't been overextending himself trying to be a hero; he'd just been trying to defuse a situation that was already bad, and rapidly moving to worse. And when Raylan had shown up...it had been impossible not to feel relief wash over him like a heavy blanket.

Ganymede closed his eyes when that hand came up to mold along his jaw, and all the tension abruptly left him, leaning heavily into Raylan's chest, cheek pressed to the soft fabric of his shirt. His hair was still plaited back in the long, thick braid he habitually wore it in, trailing down his spine though he tugged it over his shoulder, absently pulling on the end as he took several measured breaths, deep enough to feel his ribs expand. "I saw you when you came in and he aimed at you, and I was scared. I didn't--and don't--want you hurt because of me."

Free hand slipping naturally around G's shoulders as Raylan embraces him, thumb rubbing back and forth across where it could in what comfort he could give. He knew that his appearance sometimes brought relief, but it did little in the aftermath of things, when the adrenaline finally fades.

"It won't be the last gun pointed at me, darlin'. My draw just has to be better. And it is. I've done this high noon shit more than once." It's what he would be doing his whole life, riding that line between life and death, fate held in a breath and a heart beat.

"I do it so you don't have to. " He does it so no one else has to. So single mothers and abused souls who don't have it in them don't have to do it. "They're just men who chose poorly. Ain't worth half a thought, they chose their paths."

Raylan's presence brough more relief than he knew, at least for Ganymede; he'd been there, he'd stayed until the end--hell, they were here together in Raylan's apartment. Motel room. Whatever. It was nicer than some places Ganymede had lived, and he was willing to take the company however he got it, as long as it was his lover. "I know it won't be," he murmured, the fingers of his free hand curling absently around one belt loop of the man's trousers, pressing as if the gentle tug would bring Raylan closer than he already was.

"I wouldn't want you to be anything but who you already are," Ganymede said quietly, purposefully not moving the hand across his back and shoulders, lifting his head as one hand traced its thumb across mcross Raylan's lip, feeling the swell of muscle and heat of skin under him. "Just... Kiss me, and shut me up for a little while.'

It's hard to truly believe that statement, that he doesn't want Raylan to be anything than what he already is - a few near death experiences would probably change that sooner or later, as it always did. But that was down the road and right now, Ganymede had asked for something simple. Easy to do and sinking into something that doesn't require any thought about what they've been through was Raylan's weakness.

So he does as he is asked, bending down to kiss the seemingly younger man and move their weight back onto the bed. Yes, he would kiss. Kiss and worship Gaynmede down to the bone if he was allowed, long fingers already getting impatient with the fabric that kept him from G's soft skin so selfishly. It didn't matter that Gaynmede was hurt or it did matter, but it wasn't going to stop them. Raylan understood that too. A little pain was a good reminder, a good motivator and sometimes the silver-lining on the high that was their own arousal.

His lover splayed him out so easily on the bed, hemmed in by his much lankier partner; Raylan had him beat in reach, he knew that, though they were the same height, and not much different in weight. But he wasn't pinned, not restrained as much as kept in close where every part of the other was in easy reach, and Ganymede could feather his hands out over the sweep of Raylan's ribs and waist, tugging his shirttails free from his belt, tripping over the maddening and suddenly-arcane buttons holding it closed. He wanted to touch skin, and feel the warmth of his lover pressed tightly to him. He loved the way Raylan's chest felt against his back, one arm heavy on his waist when they slept together, and his breath fluttering against his shoulder and neck.

Ganymede opened his thighs to pull his lover in closer still, short nails gently scratching at the small of Raylan's back, lips still pressed together. "God, you're beautiful," he breathed, the tip of his nose brushing his lover's cheek. "And you're mine."

Ganymede smelled like sweat and blood and gunfire, life and fear and victory over the ultimate enemy - death. They'd made it, they'd survived and Raylan was already a little drunk on Ganymede's closeness. As he always was. He breaths in the musk with a little note of appreciation for the legs around him, for the scratching of his back and hums another little note.

"All yours," he purrs, lifting only just enough to pull his shirt up over his head, leaving him dressed in the a-line undershirt that rode up his hip as he comes back down to kiss Ganymede breathless again. He wanted to make sure the man was gasping before turning the soft scrape of his lips down Ganymede's jaw and towards his ear.

"And here to make you think about nothin' other than us movin' together." The sentiment comes with a lean in of his hips, erection already well evident. "Let's get you outta that shirt."

Normally, he'd just start helping that process along, but G was hurt. They had to be careful in some spots.

"I want you all over me," Ganymede breathes gently, head tilting up and away under the scratch of Raylan's goatee, one hand skating up his lover's back and the other pulling at his shirt, trying to get it off without unbuttoning it, tugging ineffectively. "On me, inside me. Come on," he moans, voice kicking up at the end whe Raylan slides his lips up towards his earlobe. He bucks up, stronger than most everyone gives him credit for given his willowy shape, forcing his head back against the sheets.

"Please, please, please," he sighs, breath coming faster and thicker, slinging one of his knees around Raylan's hip to pull him in flush against his front, squeezing gently and showing that his own erection is already at full mast behind his jeans, the denim keeping his cock pressed to his belly. "I don't want you to be gentle, Raylan."

Raylan pulls back and helps his lover out of his shirt, fingers quickly undoing his own belt and top button before freeing Ganymede from that too. He had never had any issue not being gentle when Ganymede wanted it, but it wasn't something he easily or lightly assumed. But when given a green light, there wasn't any hesitation.

"Kick off your shoes," he says with a dark and husky rumble, toeing off his boots and kicking them to the side so he could shuck his jeans and start pulling Gaynmede's off. He only cared about the first leg, enough to get things free, enough that he could swoop in and consume Gaynmede's cock to the back of his throat. It was only half for distraction, his free hand fumbling into the nightstand to grab some lube. The blowjob would only last a few glorious skilled seconds - Raylan enjoyed giving oral sex as much as he liked receiving it - before he was popping off and moving forward, slick cock pressing into and past Ganymede's tight ring with a groan as he claims the man's mouth again.

The jeans Raylan peeled him out of like a fruit shell, turning inside-out with a throaty chuckle as he kicked off his shoes, scooting back on the bed until his lover swallowed him down and made him bow up like a taut string. "Oh--god, Raylan," he gasped, swallowing thickly, one hand barely coming up to cradle the back of his lover's head before he pulled off.

He fell back with a shuddering sigh, letting Raylan push him up, biting into those lips when they met his and groaning with a flutter of eyelashes at the feel of his cock pressing against him. "F--fuck, yes," he sighed against Raylan's mouth, curling up against him. He hitched one leg up higher with a soft hiss and a little grimace at the tug on his stitches, but nothing was going to stop him from enjoying sex with his lover, still riding high on the buzz from adrenaline after the afternoon. "Just like that, just...like that," he breathed, head flopped back on the blankets scrunched up beneath them. "Just don't stop."

Edited 2024-08-19 02:40 (UTC)

Raylan loves those sounds, breathing them in like they were fuel for his fire. He thrusts a few times, hard to bury himself swiftly in the tight hot clutch of Gaynmede's body before setting into something of a rhythm as he kisses and bites at his lover's neck.

"You feel perfect," he breathes back, pulling back so that he can hook his hands behind Gaynmede's knees and spread him wide so that Raylan can enjoy the view of him spread out and eager underneath him, his bangs falling wild in front of his eyes. Just as eager to earn more of those gasping breathless noises, Raylan fucks him steadily before slowing to bury himself in deep and hard a few times more.

"This what you want, darlin'?"

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