tinstar | Slingin' from the hip, never the heart.

"I've never been here before. You don't even talk about Kentucky." She's as mystified as he is.

Willa follows him into the offices, wondering if she'll recognize any faces or names. She's heard of Art Mullins, mostly secondhand from her mom or Raylan's current Miami coworkers, now and then.

What she doesn't expect is for the pretty Black woman with a desk in the same cubicle as Raylan's to smile at her in open welcome. "Hey, Willa. We heard you were coming back to town. Here to stay this time?"

She opens her mouth. Closes her mouth. And looks up at her dad, mystified.

Once he gets out of here, he maintains there's simply no need. Nothing for anyone he loves here, nothing for him. To hell with the past, and it's ghosts.

Raylan keeps his painfully confused look as they step into the offices and it doesn't change with Rachel's greeting. So it's not just Don. He had to wonder if Winona would know too, like some big cosmic joke was being played on him and Willa. He needed to make that call.

"For a couple days at least, Rachel," he answers, supplying her name for Willa's sake only. "We haven't really decided the rest yet - Can you-" He gestures at Willa with a finger and Rachel nods, setting down her pen and leaning back in her chair. Raylan gestures towards his desk at Willa and starts to walk away with - "Won't take me but a minute-" as he pulls his blackberry out of his inside jacket pocket. Stepping into the conference room, Raylan keeps half an eye on Willa as he dials up Winona's number and listens to the ringing.

Willa makes a noise of protestation over being given a babysitter when he's not even leaving the building and Rachel grins. "Come on, I'll show you my nephew's favorite gag when he visits me."

Winona picks up after the fourth ring, with unsettled baby noises close to the receiver. "Yeah, Raylan, what is it?"

Ah. He could tell she wasn't in a great mood. The fussing was about right - Never stops bitching, Winona had once said, exhausted from days of it, and he still couldn't help but wonder if soemthing was wrong with Willa to make her cry that much. Winona assured him she had it under control, thank you, and to mind his own business about it.

"I got somethin' real weird to ask you."

"Okay?" 'Get on with it then'.

"You've.. Everythin' alright there?"

"Well Willa hasn't slept in what feels like four days, I can't find anyone to watch her during book club for this whole month and we were supposed to be out the door to go to Gayle's a half hour ago, but I can't set her down without hearin' all kinds of hell about it, so if you've got somethin' to ask me, please get on with it."

He took and let a deep breath. "I-I got a girl in the office here, showed up at my apartment this mornin'. Out of my apartment this morning. Say's she's Willa. 15 years old."

Maybe he just needed to hear from someone else that this was crazy. That he was crazy.

"What?" She's distracted, yeah, but there's something in her tone that says she's clearly not truly hearing him, either. "Raylan, what on earth are you talking about. Someone named Willa broke into your apartment?"

Willa herself is pretending to look for fugitives to offer Raylan as possible date options. But as soon as Rachel gets called away by someone--someone else who knows Willa's name--she's looking up Clement Mansell. And trying to print what comes up before anyone comes back.

"Yeah, I guess.." It sounded stupid when he said it all out loud. He knew that.

"Okay? And? You know what to do with kids. Find someone in the office to call CPS, let them handle her."

"Winona, she knows stuff. Specific type stuff that I find it hard to believe would be a research packet for a fifteen year old girl. She-.. " He sighs out his nose and looks back over to see Willa behind his desk and typeing away.

He knocks on the window to get her attention and shakes his head. Don't do that.

"Shit, Winona, she looks like us."

"Okay. Take a picture. Then send her to CPS."

The background fussing turns into crying. "Look, I need to take care of the real Willa. Was this it?"

Willa looks up at the knocking on the glass, eyes huge with innocence as she takes her hands off the keyboard. She already got what she wanted. Maybe he'll look away long enough for her to close the search page without him noticing her move the mouse. ...Then she just has to be sneaky about getting the paperwork off the printer. And hide it somewhere until she has a chance to give it a proper look.

Edited 2023-08-14 01:11 (UTC)

Satisfied with Willa's drawback and irritated by Winona's dismissal of it all, Raylan sighs as he paces away from the door.

"I don't think you're understandin' me here - everyone at the courthouse says they know her. Acts like they know her. It's.. weird."

Winona sighs back at him. "Raylan, really, I don't know what else to tell you okay? Willa and I have got actual problems here. We're late already. I'm hanging up now."

"Winona-" But she'd done just what she promised and he was left with a dead line. He frowns at his phone for a long second and bites his lip as he looks back towards the rest of the office. Guess he really was dealing with this on his own. Shit.

He needed another long minute by himself before he was sauntering back out to the open room of the office, eyes sweeping over towards his desk first.

Willa... is not there. She's on her way back there from the printer, studying the papers in her hand. It's a lot of pages already.

She almost runs into her dad. Starts to apologize. Then realizes who she crashed into. "Uh."

With a large stab of panic and a glance around him, he doesn't expect her to be coming from that direction. Hands spread as if to catch her, always polite to make sure you're not knocking people over, he frowns at her and the small stack of papers in her hands.

Now he had reason to be suspicious.

"What are you up to?" A hand is held out. Turn 'em over.

Fuck, she thinks, emphatically. Her lips purse in annoyance and chagrin, she hesitates, and then holds out the paperwork. It's Clement Mansell's file, with the addition of his last known.

"I was just curious."

Better that she gives it over than him having to grab it. He takes them and starts looking them over.

"Clement Mansell, who-"

Rachel looks up from her desk and the call she's on.

"Raylan? I got Harlan PD on the line. They're askin' for you."

Raylan glances over his shoulders, lips tight in open annoyance before he looks back at Willa. "We'll talk about this later."

Striding over, he takes the phone. "Givens." His expression gets darker, the longer he's on the phone.

"Is there a reason I'm still solvin' your problems?" A beat. "Yeah, and ain't I just fuckin' lucky for it." He sighs as he hands the phone back to Rachel, looking over at Willa.

"We're gettin' back on the road. C'mon."

Saved by The Call. That's a new one. Harlan PD, Rachel had said. They're getting back on the road?

Willa trots over to him, sticking close until they're in the elevator and the doors are closed. "Harlan? We're going to Harlan?"

"Unfortunately." His face suggested he was less than pleased about it.

"Apparently, someone decided to go skydiving without a parachute and someone's broken into the house. Unrelated, I'm assuming. Tim and Art will meet us down there."

Raylan leads them back out and to his car, stride unforgiving as he fidgets with the horseshoe ring on his finger, papers still caught up in the left. He doesn't say anything as he turns the engine over and pulls them out of the lot.

Edited 2023-08-14 02:24 (UTC)

Okay. That's... right, sure. She'll figure that one out on the way.

She has to jog to keep up with him through the building then the parking lot. The whole time she's cycling through the questions she's built up over the years, trying to decide which to start with.

"Whose house got broken into, did the guy go through the roof? Can we go to your old house while we're there? Who's Tim? Does he live down there?"

She climbs into the car, buckling up as her dad tosses the file onto the dashboard. Willa doesn't think she can reach it from here.

He can't help but sigh a bit at the string of questions, thinking back on a conversation with Winona one time where he'd done the same exact thing. Maybe Winona was right, maybe he was crazy, but he was seeing parallels. He normally didn't make those outside of Kentucky.

"Technically, Arlo's house. No, he didn't go through the roof, he smeared across the street. Arlo's is my old house and Tim is another Marshal I work with. He lives here in town. You'll meet him later." Likely when Tim has to chase Raylan down because he isn't where he was supposed to be doing what he was supposed to be doing.

"It's a bit of a ride though, so get comfortable. About two hours."

Two hours where he was her captive audience.

For a moment after her dad says he smeared across the street, Willa just stares, wide-eyed. He's never been half that blunt with her. It takes her about five--well, no, more like three--minutes to start bombarding him with questions again.

What did he do for fun as a kid? Where was his favorite place to go? Is it still there? Who were his friends? What were they like? Arlo is his dad, right?

A good way to discourage questions like that was with some dark, stark truths and, without the benefit of experience with her, time to chew over his choices and options about how to deal with these things, he was going on his gut. Something he almost regrets as soon as Willa launches in and he does his best to field them.

Check out a lot of abandoned barns, a little grove in a nearby holler by a creeks, he supposes it's still there, though they might get shot at if they're not careful about it; he declares Willa doesn't need to know about his friends and yeah, his daddy was Arlo and that was the only thing she needed to know about him.

Raylan's jaw got a little tighter after that though, and he steers the conversation towards what she could expect to see, peppered with him gesturing out a window every time they passed cows. Finally, he turns them down a seemingly random dirt road to come to a stop in front of the two story, rundown and shabby looking house.

"Here it is," he says with a sigh, turning off the car and slipping out.

Slingin' from the hip, never the heart. | Open Post

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