the_cupbearer | psl for Raylan: post-shootout

If he'd ever been asked, Ganymede would have readily answered that the thing he loved hearing most was Raylan's voice panting and making those soft grunts that signalled all too clearly how close his lover was to orgasm. The rasp of heavy breathing and the way he shudders are intoxicating to witness, and Ganymede shuddered in his grasp as they both rode out the last aftershocks from the other that left them utterly spent. Or at least him utterly spent, and the melodic ache from his side was turning into a faintly maddening itch.

He slid gently and comfortably into Raylan's embrace, feeling no need to interrupt the moment with too many words when he nuzzled himself into place, fingertips brushing back the marshal's soft hair, feeling the short ends prickle at his nape. He just hummed and tucked himself in against his lover, tossing back the braid he hadn't bothered to undo yet and stretching the fraction of an inch to kiss Raylan. "You're amazing," he whispered softly.

This was one of Raylan's favorite things. The settled feeling of relaxed heavy limbs on and around him, a warm breath into his neck as his heartbeat drums in his ears. His cock has gone half soft, enough for him to slide out of Ben with a shift of his hips and meet that kiss with a deep, back of the throated hum of contentment.

"I think that distinct honor is yours," he husks, voice rough. The way he saw it, Ganymede was the hero for taking it and taking it as roughly as he did. "Survivin' the whole day and then also that-" His lips curl at the edges - he's teasing a little, always happy to inject levity. A hand comes up to brush back a loose hair from Ben's face, Raylan's eyes warm and openly loving looking over the man's sharp, handsome features.

"I'd tell you to stay outta trouble, but I got a feelin' that ain't gonna mean much especially since you're already here with me." The levity faulters a little, smile falling into something a little more somber.

"Terrible things woulda come, had this gone a different way you know."

"At least part of what I've survived today was better than most other things combined," Ganymede answered, closing one eye to let Raylan brush the stray hair from his face. His was extraordinarily long for anyone, but especially for a man, brushing his waist when it was left loose--that was rare, especially if he'd been at work, and he didn't particularly do well idle. "There's some trouble I'd rather be in myself than subject anyone else to."

He could take it: he'd taken an awful lot in his long life, not that anyone else knew that...but the idea still stood. He reached up slowly, gently tracing his fingertips over the edges of Raylan's lips, eyes dark and depthlessly quiet, but awake and alert.

"If things had gone a different way meaning if I had been shot somewhere else," he supplied. Somewhere fatal. The addendum hung in the air between them unspoken, though they both heard it, Ganymede knew. "I'm sturdier than I seem, Raylan. I promise."

"You said that before," he murmurs about the trouble Ben would rather take on himself. Raylan hadn't forgotten but no matter how many times it's told to him, that doesn't ease the deep seated worry and fear that something would happen to the man.

Of course, Ben was right about what Raylan meant, what he was driving at without saying the words and Raylan hums a note of acknowledgement.

"Sturdy don't stop a well aimed bullet, darlin', you know that. Luckier than you seem, now that I could take without blinkin' an eye. Lucky enough to have not caught that bullet in your heart or head."

Ganymede smiles gently at that, and...honestly he might have let it be, he could have let Raylan believe whatever he wanted about how sturdy Ganymede was. But there was something there that gave him the smallest glimmer of hope that he might understand. That this man, who likely had very little grasp on Homeric hymns and epic poetry and mythologies from half a world away and several dozen lifetimes ago, wouldn't think he was insane for what was going to happen.

If, of course, he told him.

"Do you trust me, Raylan?" he asked quietly, not accusatory in the slightest. It was an honest question. "Enough to tell you something I...really don't tell anyone else?" He'd done this before, had this exact conversation with an incredibly wide variance in outcome, but each time was new, and worrying, and each time gave him that faintly gnawing feeling in the pit of his stomach. "I don't want you to think I'm crazy."

Raylan shifts, rolling them a little so they're both mostly on their side with Ben's weight leaned into him so they could be a little more comfortable. He frown oh so softly, a mere tightening between his brow, a faint downturn of his lips as he glances over Ben's features.

"'Course I trust you. I don't think you got into this situation on purpose-"

He had no way of understanding what Ben was driving at though and a clever brain always tries to project out and be ready.

"No, no, nothing like that," Ganymede chuckles, shaking his head as he rolls with Raylan to settle down, chin perched on his lover's shoulder. "I just...want you to understand why it seems like I'm not worried about being shot." Partly, he'll admit, it's because he's truly not worried, but the reason for that is something concrete.

He rubbed the pad of his thumb gently over the faintest of creases between Raylan's brows, smoothing the skin as if it would soothe the concern as well. "It's very hard to seriously injure me. And that's not bravado speaking when I say that, it's...experience. I'm much older than I look."

It was a strange but deep kind of comfort, that soft touch on his brow that was working so hard to smooth out his worry and misunderstanding. It did it's job too, easing out some of the obvious consternation in his features but did nothing for the concern that stayed in his dark brown eyes.

"What's that mean?"

He could only come up with 'luck' but luck only held out so long. Luck wasn't experience - Experience was something different. It meant getting shot a few times along the way too.

"Which part?" he asked with a crooked little smile, calm as ever. He was stil laying against Raylan, legs tangled in the sheets even as he moved his head to press his lips to the curve of his lover's shoulder. "The age...well. It sounds a bit ridiculous out loud. But this winter I will be sixty-seven hundred and thirty-eight. Maybe thirty-nine, I'm not entirely sure with calendar changes."

The rest of it was a slightly different story. "I have been shot before, yes. Close enough to the heart."

Raylan shifts, moving up onto his elbow as he processes that, as he stares into his lovers face trying to see those years somewhere. They weren't hidden away in any lines, weren't peaking out with any greys, didn't reflect in anything other than the wisdom that time left in a pair of eyes.

"I-" He knew it was stupid to say but he wasn't always as sharp as he was behind a barrel. "I don't understand, how's that possible?"

Ganymede sits back on his heels and lets him shift up, though he doesn't try to box his partner in any. He just lets Raylan look and sighs gently when he asks how any of that came to be possible.

"The...simple answer," --because none of them were easy answers, he knows that intimately and he stumbles through how to explain what he is every time he has to do this-- "Is that a very long time ago, I got someone's attention, and he decided he liked me enough that he wanted to keep me. Forever. So he gave himself the gift of my never aging. I haven't since I wasn't nineteen."

Raylan doesn't pull away aside from that small shift, not wanting to create space between them but he also won't stop Ben if wants to pull away. He didn't.

"I-" No, he still didn't quite understand. "Who?"

Nineteen? Part of him felt a little dirty somehow - he was a 43 year old man. He knew Ben was young - no. Presented as young but Raylan somehow both felt like a cradle robber and a robbed cradle himself. It didn't matter. Not really, not once they were outside legality and he knew that Ben's ID claimed older than 19.

Ganymede doesn't back up any further, and he's still sitting close to Raylan; he doesn't want buffer space for this, because he knows pretty well that Raylan is not the type to be physically violent at someone who hasn't earned it, or out of lack of imaginative options.

"His name was Zeus. Still is." He was still around, though greatly diminished. "I feel like I should tell you nineteen was a great deal more adult then than it is now. I wasn't a little boy, even then." And yes, he could pass for mid-twenties fairly easily, if he dressed and spoke and moved the right way; that was easy enough and he'd been doing it for years now. "I suppose it goes without saying that my birth name is not Benjamin Prince."

To be fair, 19 wasn't a child as it was, just young, just lacking experience. And 6,7000 years old was more experience than regular people could process inside a heartbeat. But there was no path for Raylan to get mad about it - things were what they were. Zeus at least, Raylan knew. Zeus was a whore, even in modern tellings.

The realization that Benjamin Prince wasn't his name felt like a betrayal more than anything else, if only because part of Raylan's heart was starting to sink into this relationship. Trust was being built with every successful day that neither of them got hurt in one way or another. And inside a heartbeat, in a flash, he wondered if he knew 'Ben' at all.

But it was a small hurt in a long list of hurts Raylan has had over his life, and one he knew he could deal with.

"I think I'm gonna need that drink now." It's sighed with wide eyes as he pushes himself all the way up and pads over to their makeshift bar to pour himself a drink. Halfway through he looks over his shoulder at his lover again.

"Zeus? Like, The Zeus?"

"Yes," Ganymede said with a soft exhale, not quite a sigh. "That Zeus."

He watched Raylan move and go to the bottle to pour himself a drink, acutely aware of what hadn't been said yet--and might not ever be said. But he'd begun the conversation, and even if it went badly he was going to finish it. "I know it sounds ridiculous. But it is the truth."

The first drink poured is downed before he's pouring out two more and carrying them back over towards the bed so he can sit down, one glass handed out to Ben.

"I believe you, darlin'. You got no reason to lie to me about this, far as I can tell. I just.. I don't quite understand how it's possible is all. Let's-- let's just start this simple. If Benjamin isn't your name, what is, and what do you want me to call you?"

He takes the drink, rearranging to unfold his legs a bit as he sips at it. Alcohol really does nothing to him at this point, and he rarely pretends otherwise unless he's trying to get himself shitfaced--which is, thankfully, rare. "My legal name is still Benjamin. And it's been what everyone's called me for the last fifteen or twenty years. The name I was born with is...well, the language we spoke is dead, but the closest thing to it is Γανυμήδης. In English it's Ganymede, but very few people know that."

Ganymede shrugs gently as if he were trying to rearrange an ill-fittign shirt, though he's still comfortably naked where he sits. "You can call me anything you like, Raylan. I can be just Ben, like I have been."

"It ain't about what I like. I think names are important. They mean somethin' to people."

It was about respect, it was about calling him by what he wanted to be called by, without any masks or lies or cover ups to keep his life the way it was going.

"What do you want?"

"They do," he admits, nodding. "And names are important. My given name, Ganymede, means roughly 'rejoicing in virility', which I would love to not have to explain all the time," he says with a gentle laugh at himself. "The names I choose for myself do tell a story as well--Benjamin meaning son of the right hand, or favored son; Prince meaning, well...prince. And I was. Youngest son of the king," Ganymede said quietly, drinking more bourbon. He does still miss his family, however much times, and the family dynamics, were different then.

"What I told you before is still true. I had two older brothers, and both are dead. And my hometown was destroyed in a war. Just the Trojan War." He reached out for Raylan's hand, fingertips gentle on the back of his hand. "I want you to call me Ben. What you have been calling me. I am Benjamin Prince as much as I am Ganymede son of Tros, as much as I was Bellamy Martel, or Sebastian Maddox. Or any other names I've had."

There was no hesitation in the way Raylan's hand turns over to spread his fingers and capture Ben's, entwining them together with a soft squeeze. He was stunned, brow softly furrowed and mind stuck on 'The Trojan War'. He didn't even know how long ago that was, without looking it up.

"So you're Greek?" The words were out of his mouth before he could help it and he felt immediately stupid for it. It didn't matter what Ben was, even if Raylan was asking out a curiosity about the man himself.

"Alright so you're - Immortal? What happens if you do catch a bullet in an unlucky place? I know you bleed, I can see the damage but-" How did that translate out?

"Trojan," Ganymede corrected softly, shaking his head a little though he squeezed Raylan's hand back with no small amount of relief. That his partner was confused or concerned or both he didn't mind; that he wasn't rapidly heading towards the belief that Ganymede was insane was what mattered. "Losing side of the war. I'd be...sort of halfway between Turkish and Greek, if I had to try and put a name to it." But he doesn't really consider himself any modern ethnicity or nationality, to be fair. He predates most countries anyway.

"That's where the slightly more complicated parts come in. I am immortal, yes, in that I won't age or die of natural cause. It...properly, I would be a demigod, though I don't really think of myself that way. But I can be injured--and temporarily, I can be killed. It's happened before even if only temporarily." Several times--many times, if he cared to count them all, but he doesn't. "But it doesn't stay. I always come back again, like waking up after you fall asleep too suddenly. I've never stayed dead more than about half an hour, at my best estimate."

Edited 2024-10-27 00:14 (UTC)

Raylan had always assumed the Trojan's were Greek, but that was likely obvious from the kneejerk question. He was open to re-education, even if this wasn't something he could possibly ever imagine without help understanding. Neither was he going to be testing what Ben was telling him and it will probably take him seeing it happen over the next few days for the reality of it to set in.

"A half hour? Shit. You're not Lazarus from the Bible too, are ya?"

It was an attempt at a joke - if they could even huff a little bit of a laugh, they were okay, right? Or had Ben heard that before, a million times over thousands of years.

"I'm not, that I can say easily. Though I have met some of those," he adds--people from the Bible, he means, though he doesn't elaborate much. "It's caused me some problems before. Waking up in a pine box and a shallow grave after being hanged doesn't do you any favors with anyone much."

Ganymede shifts back over to lean in against Raylan with a soft smile and a gentle laugh. "Back then there really wasn't a 'Greece' like we think of it now, it wasn't just one country. There were a dozen or more cities, each their own place, and their own people. But no, I wasn't Greek at all--people used to use that as an insult to men who like anal sex, 'being greek'. Because there was, and still is, a lot of social stigma attached to men who like being on the bottom." He's not angry, and he's certainly not insulted, because he knows Raylan didn't mean the question like that.

"I know it's hard to wrap your head around."

Raylan was quiet for a long few moments. It was a lot. A little overwhelming if he was honest and he was struggling, despite him trying his best. It was hard to articulate, only because there was such a vast age of references that lay between them. Vast age of understanding and experience between them.

The tidbit about 'being greek' being some insult about gay men made Raylan pull a disgusted face and shake his head. "No, god, I- I've never heard it bein' like that; that's not what I meant at all. It's not an opinion that I'm vocal about outside for obvious reasons, but anyone willin' to take a dick, to deal with primal men like that - winner in my book."

He believed it, yes, but there was a hint of 'telling yourself something a million times over to make it true' underneath the way he says it all.

"And it is. A lot to wrap my head around. Thank you for tellin' me, even if I'm gonna need to chew this in installments." If that was okay. He was a simple man and there was nothing simple about this situation.

Ganymede had to chuckle at the face Raylan made at that, shaking his head. "No, no. I didn't think you meant it like that. I just thought...you should know. I didn't think you'd think less of me for it anyway," he murmurs--not only because he's been in that position with Raylan himself, but also because the marshal just doesn't seem the type to spew vitriol over something as trivial as sex preferences. "You're allowed to be confused about it all. I am, and I've lived it."

And sometimes, his life barely made sense to him, much less anyone else. "And you're allowed to not want to know any more, either. If this is just too much, and too weird...you can blame it on today being a mess, and forget about it by morning." Ganymede wouldn't begrudge him that. He'd normally have brought this up much more tactfully and not just come out with it all at once, and in bed to boot, but the circumstances had presented a rare opportunity. Still, he fidgeted, pulling the braid of his hair over his shoulder to tug on it gently, a gesture Raylan had most likely seen him do before when he wanted reassurace, but wouldn't ask for it. Not in so many words.

"Do you still want me to stay here tonight?"

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