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

"I love you too," she mumbles, pressing her face against his shoulder while staying wrapped around him. "I would have thought I was nuts too if you hadn't been here. Like... Me, with the Gift, and a bunch of people who don't even know it's supposed to exist, and... I mean I could manage on my own, I've done it, but. I don't want to."

That last part is very quiet, almost ashamed.

"You don't gotta," he replied with a breath and a pat of her shoulder. It hurt too much somehow, beautifully, to say this all and look at it in its face and he wasn't able to do much more of it without breaking in a way he wasn't sure he could handle.

"Alright, c'mon. We're gonna soak somethin' at this rate. We gotta pick out yer mattress."

She gives a soggy little laugh and draws back, letting him lead the way--after snagging an un-syruped waffle to eat like a giant cookie while they're at it.

The old TV is comforting in a way that surprises her, though it shouldn't, given what she and Jeff always do when he's trying to make her feel better. She keeps up a steady commentary through the whole thing, teasing while still making it clear she's enjoying herself.

Eventually she crashes, unwillingly, and dreams about fire chasing her through tunnels blocked by gates. Athena gasps awake, still on the mattress, in a fresh change of clothes that aren't pajamas but were still better than what she arrived in. That was going to be a thing she needed. Clothes.

She curls up on the mattress for a moment, pulling the blanket over her head, but it's too late and too light out for her to go back to sleep. Instead she gets up as quietly as possible to explore the house.

It really had been kind of like a sleep out, if firearms were allowed; Raylan, stretched himself half upright in the corner of the couch, hands folded over his middle as he listened to Athena's critique of the movie. His tease back consisted of her just being jealous of the swagger, the horses, and the hats. The latter two they could get her, the first one she would have to work on herself.

Raylan lasted all of three minutes after the TV's static fuzz was turned off, ears perked towards her light breathing amid the soft noises of the night.

The gasp awake has Raylan waking up too, but he wasn't as high strung anymore. Getting out of Mathis had been the best thing for him and his head, and he might still be on the way, but on the way he was towards normal. His cracked eye slid shut as Athena decided she was done laying down and he was happy to play asleep to let her get up and around.

One he was sure she'd found her way out of his intended path, her quiet footfalls not so quiet in a house he knew the sounds of so well, he got up himself with a half breathed groan and went to start coffee. God only knows what she'd find - Arlo's anything, one of his guns or his uniform that was still kept in the closet. Boxes of his mothers clothes in the attic, maybe even the not so secret box that was in his old dresser drawer. There were a lot of little treasures to find throughout the house and no one to stop her walk through his history.

She's pretty sure Raylan would have warned her off any things she's not allowed to explore. She does indeed find Arlo's uniform and a gun that looks too much like it works for her to want to touch it. In the attic, she sees the boxes. Frances Givens written on the side. For a confused moment she wonders if Raylan had a brother or a great uncle he's never mentioned, but when she opens the boxes it's all women's clothing.

It's not hard to put two and two together. Carefully, respectfully, she folds things away and boxes them up again.

When she finds the little box in Raylan's dresser she's tempted to open it right there. Checking the dressers, the cabinets--it's habit by now from Mathias and from when she looted places she was able to get into while she was on the street. She smooths her fingers over the top of it, thinking of those boxes in the attic.

Finally, instead of opening it, she takes it downstairs with her to wait for Raylan to wake up. Or she plans to wait, anyway, but the couch is empty and she panics for a moment before hearing him in the kitchen. She pokes her head in, smelling the coffee. "Holy shit, is that something that isn't knock-off Folgers?"

There wasn't anything here he cared about her seeing. Most of it was trash, if he was asked, and all of it would be donated wholesale - from the pictures, their frames, down to the bedding and knickknacks. Everything that made this place feel even slightly the way it did now. Like a home, yes. But a home haunted for Raylan, not matter how peaceful the nights.

The smell of coffee wafted through the house, helping draw Athena back into the hopefully now familiar kitchen and its chintzy, old yellowed wallpaper. He was staring out a window at the barren fields and turned around with a grin.

"Maxwell house. Folgers is expensive." Not that he couldn't afford it but he kept his money by not spending it. "We got half and half and milk, unless you want it black," he said, waving a cup in her direction. His eyes glanced over the box in her hands but for now, he didn't say anything.

She wrinkles her nose. “I had thought better of you, sir.”

She sets the box on the table and starts to reach for a spare cup and the pot handle, but Athena grins slowly and steps back again. “Remember that day when I tried to move a cup and like. Exploded that house’s living room?”

Raylan chuckled and shrugged with his shoulders and the rolling lift of his eyebrows as he sipped at his cup. It didn't matter that he made decent cash now, some habits couldn't ever be shaken.

But at Athena's suggestion, his gaze narrowed on her before glancing over at the pot and cup.

"If you break 'em, I do not have a spare pot or cups beyond what's in here." Forewarning given, Raylan stepped back several feet, hands widening in a gesture of 'Go ahead'.

Athena cracks her knuckles, lighting up even further, though not literally. "I'm going to Mary Poppins the shit out of this bitch."

She considers for a moment, takes a deep breath, and starts singing Elton John's The Bitch is Back.

It seems appropriate.

She's not just moving the cup, though, and pouring the coffee with the kind of precision a barista would envy--she's manipulating her own voice with it, serving as her own back-up vocals in lieu of having any instruments.

There might be an Elton John-worthy lights show going on along with it.

Once she's added half-and-half just to show off, she winds the song down, floating the cup over to herself and finishing the last note as she plucks it from the air. Looking extremely self-satisfied.

'Mary Poppins the shit out of this bitch' got an amused curl of his features and as much as he trusted Athena, the last experience hadn't been great and he didn't know how it was supposed to work. Not really.

Until now. Raylan watched with an attentive critical eye, brow pinching faintly as the cup and pot started moving. It didn't look anything at all like Matilda, for example, but more like Harry Potter. (No, he hadn't read the books or watched the movies but it was hard to not have seen enough little bits of the source and listen to the fans that followed it to catch on to the general gist.)

By the time she's done, he's staring at her with his head tilted, hazels narrowed over the creeping curl of a smile he was trying to fight.

"Well damn, Mary. Didn't know you could do all that. Can you call birds and shit too, like Snow White? Might have some work for the squirrels." The house and land were in a state of creeping disrepair that needed to be addressed sometime in the next 15 years.

She takes a cheerful, satisfied slurp of coffee, makes a face both at the taste and at the heat, and then sighs happily. "I mean I could, yeah, actually? But it's really fuckin' hard, like... Say if I want to make myself float or some shit. No problem, I'm me, I'm casting the spell on myself, I want it to work. Tada."

She gestures out the window. "But like... another person? Or an animal? They've got a will of their own and if they don't want to be lifted off the ground I'm going to have a fuck of a time doing it. It's basically their will against mine, in a way."

If she looked at his face just right, she could probably see the gears turning. Raylan had to ask himself if it was something she got asked a lot - didn't she say that there were people like him around? People without the gift?

God forbid he re-enact some high school bullshit.

"That's something. A balance to it, of sorts. Let's keep it to inanimate objects and yourself for now." If it looked like he was gonna get into any shit while they were up here, he might decide to reiterate that point.

"What do ya wanna do today, songbird? Walk the property? Go for a ride?" She had him all day, her personal chauffeur.

Well, until his phone rang. He was hoping it wouldn't but it always did, eventually.

Athena hops backward up onto the counter, making a slight dismayed face as her coffee starts to slop over the cup's edges a little.

She whistles it back into the cup, just because she can.

"Fuck. I have no idea. I--oh. Um. Is there somewhere around here where I could get some clothes? Just like. Nothing fancy, but I'm going to start to smell if I keep switching between the little bit I've got. Kind of wasn't packed for a trip, if you get me."

Even that? Even wild coffee drops? Raylan whistled low and buried his face in another sip of his coffee. He was gonna have to watch her now; Little Miss Lightshow.

"Oh." Right. "Shit. Um. Corbin's probably the closest place to find somethin' like that. About thirty minutes from here. We can go after breakfast... Which we're also gonna get in Corbin, because it's the closest thing that serves something other than breakfast at breakfast time." Of course they sold the usual breakfast fare, but the restaurant didn't care much what time it was.

"Prepare yourself for more country than a whole country album," he warned with a grin."

She grins back, excited in spite of herself. This is Raylan’s home turf, the place he told her about that day in the Gull, painting a picture both vivid with life and dusty with tradition.

“That’s a good name, Corben. Like for a kid or—-” She sits sharply upright, this time not paying enough attention to save the coffee that slops over the edge of the cup. “Your kid! Is she… Are they…”

Athena gestures expansively. In the world yet.

Something in Raylan's face changed, lightening, making him look a little younger for a minute as he nodded and pulled out his phone, thumb moving to bring up a picture of one very tiny baby being held by a tired, but happy looking Winona.

"She was born a month premature, but she's alright. She and Winona both. They're in Florida though. Ain't gone to see her yet, but I'll get around to it," he said with a bob of his head and a duck of his face as the phone was taken back and tucked away.

"C'mon, lemme show you around the property while we finish our coffee and then we'll get goin', huh?"

All the better to not linger on how shit of a father he was already, not racing down to Florida to see his little girl.

Athena doesn't say anything at the declaration that he'll get around to it. She knows, she knows that Raylan is going to be a great dad, because he already was one. If he needs time to work out whateverthefuck is going on in his head before he makes the leap, she's not one to judge. Hell, Lenore had to be argued into taking her in, and look how that turned out.

She slides off the counter, more carefully this time so her coffee doesn't go everywhere. "Lead on, my good man."

Raylan only smiled and nodded towards the door, glad that she didn't argue one way or the other. There were some worries that would never stop, no matter how big or grown Willa got. It was the blessing and curse of parenting; that job was never done. Even Arlo felt that way, telling Raylan more than once how or what he should do and why, in all of his infinite wisdom. Raylan rarely listened.

Out the door they went and to the left, past a large tree that Raylan had never bothered to identify to face a large set of fields that wrapped around the house like an L. He gestured at it the dry, dusty fields, speckled only with a few wild weeds and a sagging red barn far off to the right against what reasonable people might assume was the property line, fenced.

"Everything the light touches... is my kingdom Simba," he teased with a smirk and a sidelong look. "We've got about 20 acers run up the foothill of the mountain. Used to be tobacco fields back in the day-" he squinted in the morning sun out over it all. "-But my granddaddy was a preacher and got his money other ways, so they fell fallow. Not much here except the rusted out tractor in the dilapidated barn.. and whatever else Arlo stuffed in there," he conceded easily. He didn't exactly keep track.

"A real HDTV project."

She grins crookedly at the Lion King reference, the expression fading a little as he talks. Athena studies the open land, marveling a little at that much space without a single house or building other than the barn.

"It's beautiful," she says, not joking, but still self-conscious in the statement. "It's... a lonely kind of beautiful."

Edited 2021-10-13 19:47 (UTC)

"I suppose," he said, otherwise interrupted by his cell phone ringing. He was clearly irritated by the noise, lips pinching into a thin line at the name that he saw on the screen. "Ava Crowder," he muttered, muting the call and slipping it back into his pocket with a lift of his eyebrows.

"If you ignore the graves in the front yard and just look at the sunrise... I'll grant they get some good ones here."

She glances at his phone, not asking who it is, but her relentless curiosity does wonder. When he mentions the graves, though, she looks that way. "I wasn't sure I saw them last night. I thought maybe I was just. Like. Freaked the fuck out. Who is it? That's there, I mean."

"My Granddaddy, Arlo's, my mother's, Helen's and my own. Not that I ever expect to use it," he said dryly behind another sip of his coffee. "There used to be- Goddamnit," he swore, head shaking again as he pulled his phone out.

"Gimme a sec," he said towards Athena with a lift of his eyebrows and hit answer. "Yes Ava?"

His lips tightened and he sighed out of his front nose. "Does it have to be now?"

Raylan glanced over at Athena. "Alright, gimme thirty to get there." The phone was disconnected and slid into his pocket with another sigh. "Turns out breakfast is gonna haveta wait. We're goin' for a ride."

Edited 2021-10-13 23:37 (UTC)

She can’t help relief when at the interruption. It’s unnerving, having those empty graves there, like dark promises or threats.

She slugs her coffee back, wincing slightly at the heat of it. “Where we going?”

"A hair salon."

Without further explanation, Raylan turned and headed back inside. After brushing his teeth, he slipped on the same shirt he'd worn the day before, slid into his boots.

"You need any time to get ready?"

She's sitting on the counter until he comes downstairs, but she hopes off and joins him near the door at the question. Athena spreads her arms wide and tilts her head back, as though showing off her faded, ill-fitting nineties clothes. "Bring on the paparazzi."

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omg i thought i tagged this back

/HOARDS

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