Hey all! Long time no see. Been a busy summer with work and travel, and I ended up taking a bit of a fic break. I'm back on the scene now!

A few notes about this fic…

There's some unusual subject matter here, including drug use. I will be happy to provide a long-winded explanation of my reasoning to anyone who wants to hear it, but I'm not going to do that now. I think the basis is well explained within the body of the story, so bear with me. This will be complete in 2 or 3 longish parts.

Thanks to my fic tasting panel including but not limited to Wlnut and TheGodmother2 for taking a peek at this while I was working on it and reassuring me that I'm not (totally) insane. As you see, Godmother, I did not choose to retain 'Weed Walt' as the title of this story. ;D

Smoke Signals
Part I

There was something refreshingly non-judgmental about Jamie. In his line of work— his real job, not the elaborate masquerade with the pizza boxes— maybe it was little more than a mechanism for self-defense, but Jamie carried with him an odd brand of innocence that couldn't be explained away by the innate desire to keep his neck off the chopping block.

As a highly experienced law enforcement professional Walt was prone to suspicion, constantly re-examining the boundaries of trust, unable to apportion any benefit of the doubt without winding the tape forward to view the pockets of guilt and consequences that lay beyond. Giving someone a free pass or making assumptions about their motives or lack thereof could prove deadly, an effect he had observed on far too many occasions.

Walt wasn't programmed to avoid asking questions, the way Jamie was.

"I brought you the best stuff I could find, but you're making me real nervous, Walt. Are you sure this isn't, like…?" The sentence trailed off with a helpless sigh.

Looking down briefly Walt peered at his own sock-clad feet as they flexed against the wood at the edge of the front porch, fixing onto a random and fleeting recollection of an article he'd once read about medical marijuana being used to treat PTSD.

"It's not a sting, Jamie. Just show me what you've got."

He'd needed time away after everything got tied up in a nice neat bundle— Martha's murder, the Connally shooting, Nighthorse and his associates— once the first string was pulled the whole tragedy unraveled like a poorly knit sweater. Clear-cut justice should have brought satisfaction, but ultimately it was almost too simple. Some part of Walt had wanted, maybe even needed, the process to be messy. He'd tried his damnedest to draw blood with his own hands only to be thwarted at every turn.

In the end perhaps he'd learned a lesson about respect for the living, for himself and for those who by some miracle still cared about him. On the other hand, it was taking time for certain of those hard truths to sink in. Walt knew he was the problem, but how the hell was he supposed to go about solving it?

When Ruby gently suggested a discreet therapist up in Sheridan, Walt had cringed and asked how much vacation time he had saved up.

"All of it," she'd told him. Flipping back through her day planner, she had tensed at the sight of a carefully color-coded pen mark. "Well, except that one day…"

Walt remembered that day. He remembered everything. He'd made one phone call to Jim Wilkins over in Cumberland County and then put himself on leave for twenty days, effective immediately.

After less than a week at home, Walt had realized some things. The first several ugly, angry nights coupled with one brief and disapproving visit from Henry Standing Bear clued him into the fact that alcohol wasn't going to help matters. It was probably an important conclusion to draw, but self-care tends not to start and end with blood alcohol content alone.

He tried to fill the time he would have spent drinking with more constructive and therapeutic pursuits; he worked on some small projects around the cabin, he read, he spent time with the horse. It was all fine until the moment when he realized he'd gotten bored and started reading to the horse, which seemed overly eccentric and needlessly complicated even by his own broad-minded standards.

Basically, Walt sucked at relaxing. He found himself thinking about it in exactly those terms, which immediately brought to mind the only person in his life that would ordinarily use such phrasing— Deputy Victoria Moretti.

Vic's voice was in Walt's head all the time, usually calling him out on his bullshit when he did or thought something stupid. Sometimes late at night he would recall a flash of vulnerability or a certain soft look she'd once had in her eyes before his recollections meandered forward in time to the pain and disappointment he'd observed once Vic realized that he had been willing to throw his life away to exact reckless and ill-considered measures of revenge. He'd disregarded her feelings, just like he'd done with everyone, and had now essentially left her in charge of the sheriff's department without a word of warning while he kept his distance and… did whatever it was he was doing.

She hadn't called, not once. He'd fucked up royally, and Walt found himself thinking about Vic almost more than anything else. Would they have had a chance, maybe, if he hadn't been so hell bent on doing things his way to the exclusion of all logic? She would have supported him, he was sure of it, but he'd flung all the good things left in his life away from him and it was like pushing against the tide to even think about how he could begin to bring them back.

There had been a time when Walt had thought of the tide as a peaceful force. It didn't have a lot of direct bearing on daily life in Wyoming, certainly, but during his college years in southern California he'd found the rhythm of the waves rolling against the shore to have a calming effect. College life was hectic, especially for an athlete, and there were times where the self-governing small-town introvert within Walt needed a break from all the excitement.

Once, a girl he had briefly dated offered him a joint to take with him on one of his solo explorations of secluded beachfront. A sharp burst of intellectual curiosity had caused Walt to accept. He'd grabbed a favorite book, found a rocky outcropping with an unmolested view, and ended up remaining in blissed-out repose for a number of hours. It wasn't the type of outcome he had expected, and his opinion on recreational drug use was thus thoroughly re-evaluated. He'd repeated the activity a few more times, when he needed to escape his studies or the rowdy football crowd.

A few weeks into Walt's sophomore year a third-string quarterback was kicked off the USC football team and subsequently out of school for dealing marijuana out of his dorm room, and a young offensive lineman from Wyoming made an educated decision to shelve his nascent experimentations throughout the remainder of his academic career. After that there'd been the Corp, and upon Walt's return to Absaroka County he'd found himself with a deputy's badge pinned to his chest before he could so much as think about taking some time to cut loose. Lucian Connally would have cuffed him over the ear for even considering 'that sort of hippy shit' in any case, so it seemed best to just let sleeping dogs lie.

Life had proceeded apace. A skinny and tomboyish girl named Martha who had greeted Walt with occasional wide-eyed stares before he left for college had bloomed into a lively and engaging local beauty, so they married in the summer and welcomed their first and only child the following spring. Walt and Martha's married life was generally harmonious, though they were known to fight occasionally about his long hours at work.

Even those arguments ceased after a while, once Walt became the sheriff and there was nobody left above him to absorb the responsibility. Some days Walt honestly believed that Lucian had chosen to retire solely to relinquish his exalted position as a target for Martha's ire, fond as he was of the raspberry pies he received when he stayed in her good graces.

And so the small family followed their independent pathways. Walt upheld the law and made routine minor visits to Durant Memorial Hospital, Cady grew like a weed and blew through academic ceilings like they were tissue paper, and Martha kept herself busy with activities ranging from sewing circles to community activism— in a town as small as Durant, they were often one and the same.

Maybe their marriage wasn't exciting. Perhaps it wasn't the stuff of novels, full of passionate encounters or grand romantic gestures, but on the whole they were happy.

On the day when his wife calmly announced over her half-eaten plate of lemon chicken with roast potatoes that she had been diagnosed with cancer, Walt realized that he had taken that low-maintenance state of contentment entirely for granted. Maybe the guilt had started to bind him up in that very moment, with a fork full of green beans dangling in the air and a sinking sensation settling into the pit of his stomach.

Martha didn't deserve this. Surely there was something Walt had or hadn't done, some failing as a man or as a husband, that had caused it. He didn't believe for one moment that "It is what it is" in life, so in the sleepless waking hours long past midnight he couldn't help but wonder what bad medicine he'd stepped into, what transgression or oversight he was being punished for.

It was true what Walt told people, sometimes as a thinly veiled admonishment and other times as a method of misdirection when they wondered how he knew something they thought he shouldn't— he read.

Books, magazines, digests… basically anything other than the local paper, which contained far too many inaccurate or mildly insulting articles about him to be informative or enjoyable. Walt just did what all the real locals did, and got the pertinent news from Dorothy down at the Busy Bee. Reading remained a domain both of education and leisure, a task he performed with ease as a matter of habit.

So it was that Walt eventually found himself in a hospital waiting room during one of Martha's treatments, reading an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association about the use of cannabis-derived substances and their effectiveness as an antiemetic for patients undergoing chemotherapy. His wife had been experiencing almost crippling side effects of nausea, so the content of the article immediately piqued his interest. Walt knew that the studies mentioned were carefully controlled, and the chance of finding any similar opportunities to help Martha in Wyoming or surrounding states was slim to none. And yet…

His memory traveled back over twenty years to what felt like another lifetime, to a mercifully isolated nook overlooking the softly crashing waves of a steadfast ocean. That place had been a refuge for him, a chance to recuperate and regenerate, and his few but memorable experiments with marijuana had been a favorable aspect of those calming and tranquil lazy afternoons. It was something he'd never told anyone about, not even Martha. Maybe the time had finally come.

The wheels in Walt's relentlessly active brain were set in motion, and motive met opportunity in the lead up to a rare but significant drug bust in Absaroka County barely a week later.

Jamie the pizza guy was 'known to police,' but Walt hadn't looked in his file for so long he couldn't even remember the man's last name. He had turned up in the course of Walt's inquiries, with his requisite '"Now look, I don't want any trouble—" disclaimer. The statement proved truthful, as Jamie's information was both accurate and useful without any severe stripe of self-incrimination. He went on his way, back to pretending to deliver calzones and chicken wings on football night, and three days later the department was able to remove a kilo of cocaine plus enough meth to tweak a herd of cattle from the local streets.

As soon as the dust settled, Walt had ordered a pizza of his own.

Getting Jamie to understand what he was asking was the hardest part. Walt knew it wasn't exactly standard practice in the naturally nervous man's line of work to sell drugs to the police, never mind to the county sheriff himself. Especially not when said sheriff used phrases like 'effectiveness in clinical trials' and 'for medicinal purposes only' while providing assurances that the smokable items aren't for himself, personally. And by the way do you have any rolling papers?

Aside from being quite certain that Walt had finally lost his last marble after one too many concussions in the line of duty throughout the years, Martha was surprisingly open to the idea. The fact that she would agree to try such a radical treatment method worried Walt immensely, as it spoke volumes about the degree of pain she must be in and how good she'd gotten at hiding it from him.

The first time, Martha asked him to smoke it with her.

He tried to refuse, citing his status as an elected official and the danger of him being impaired by unpredictable substances even while off duty. What if something happened and he was needed? Nevertheless, she had insisted.

"Just enough to teach me how," she'd said, along with "Please, Walt?"

It was dark out, and as was usual when your nearest neighbors were two and a half long miles away there was nobody around. Still, a bit of caution was in order so they'd huddled in the dim light floating out from the kitchen onto the rough-hewn back steps. Martha watched carefully as Walt got everything prepared. After just a toke or two his extremities had tingled, brain suspended in a pleasant and floaty fog. That night, he slept better than he had in years.

There had been a sense of deja vu upon his more recent meeting with Jamie, with the pizza box prop abandoned on a tree stump and the same initially distrustful expression on Jamie's face. Even Walt's relaxed attire of jeans and a faded blue t-shirt seemed to make Jamie uncomfortable, like the whole scene was way too far outside the scope of their normal interactions to be believed. They still managed to get there in the end, and Jamie had been back one other time since.

He was storing the cluster of slightly sticky green buds in one of those small hinged tins that most men use to organize nuts and bolts in workshops and sheds across America, figuring the method to be just barely less laughable than keeping it in a glass jar in his spice cabinet. Wouldn't that be just the thing, if Cady dropped in to cook him dinner and mistook his stash for some high-test Amish oregano?

Walt shook his head, having a hard time digesting the concept that he even had a 'stash.'

Mostly he'd been smoking it at night. As in the past, it relaxed him and helped him sleep. In the six days since he'd started Walt had slept more than he had in probably the last six months, the ironic side effect being that he could feel his head beginning to clear. Just a bit of the heaviness lifted out of his bones, and the anxiety over his recent actions and his absence from work began to lessen just slightly.

In those moments where he could feel the walls of guilt pressing in, giving form and shape to his continued failings, Walt would swipe his trusty tin up from its habitual spot on the window sill behind a potted plant (apropos) and head outdoors to find a peaceful smoking spot. He thought about a lot of things; some good, some bad, some that he wasn't ready to classify. Late summer was edging into fall, so the days were hot but the nights were brisk. In the evenings Walt made himself hot beverages and sat reading classic novels on the front porch in his jacket or beneath one of the many throw blankets he possessed before slowly dosing himself into a blissful untroubled haze.

The mornings were starting to look brighter, and the days that followed began to feel like bearable measures of life and time once again.

On a Tuesday afternoon in early September the clouds hung fluffy and seemingly unmoving in the vast embrace of the deep blue Wyoming sky, while Walt leaned against a tree absently contemplating the intricacies of the water cycle. As fascinating as snowmelt runoff in the Bighorns might be, the arrival of a familiar but unexpected vehicle managed to snap Walt out of his trance.

She was quicker than he was at the best of times, and she'd already spotted him beneath the tree and strode over to his location before he could even think about getting up… especially in his current state, which was somewhere in the vicinity of two-thirds baked.

Hands on her hips in a characteristic gesture of irritation, Victoria Moretti raised an eyebrow. Walt could see it arching elegantly above the frame of her Ray Bans. Then, she spoke.

"So this is what you're doing out here while the rest of us are working like dogs? Having a fucking picnic?"

A picnic? Walt frowned in confusion, finally remembering that there was an apple and half a turkey sandwich resting on a plate next to his bent right leg. What was he supposed to say to that, anyway?

"Vic. I uhh…"

Well that was a thrilling start.

"It's not really a picnic. It's just my lunch."

"Right." Removing her sunglasses, Vic tilted her head and peered down at him, wary, arms crossed over the chest of her summer uniform top.

Walt shifted, sitting up straighter against the trunk of the tree and reaching over to scratch his left bicep just below the sleeve of his grey t-shirt. "Do you want some? I'm not really that hungry. Anymore. I had part of the sandwich, the other half, so."

He was babbling. That's what happens when you haven't heard anyone's voice including your own for three entire days, he told himself. Of course it had nothing to do with the fact that it was Vic or anything relating to the contents of the tin wedged between two protruding tree roots.

To his surprise, Vic flopped down in the grass just a few feet away and scooped the untouched apple off his plate. The small tin must have caught the sun from the new angle she was seated at, and like a true investigator she looked from the nondescript metal container to Walt's face and back again before sighing and taking a large bite of the apple.

There was something incredibly personal about watching her eat. They used to take meals together a lot, sometimes several times a day, but it suddenly felt like it had been forever since they'd done that.

He cleared his throat. "What brings you out this way?"

She didn't wait to finish her mouthful of apple before she started to answer. "Oh, you know," she swallowed, "thought I would take in the scenery, maybe spot some pronghorn or dip my little toesies in the creek."

If he'd still needed anything to eat, her sarcasm would have given him plenty to chew on.

"What the hell do you think I'm doing here? I came to check on your narrow ass since nobody has heard from you in ten days."

Picking at some grass beside him, Walt pondered for a moment. "I saw Henry six days ago."

Her eyes narrowed. "Yeah, I know. I talked to Henry last night. He said he found you at the bottom of a bottle."

Walt could hardly bring himself to feel indignant, since it was entirely true. "Well, that's not where I am now."

"Why, you finally stopped feeling sorry for yourself?" Vic attacked the apple with as much of a bite as she'd put behind her words.

"I think so. At least, I'm getting there."

It was obvious that she hadn't expected such an earnest answer from him. Their eyes locked, hers slightly gold-cast in the light filtering through the tree branches. She finished working through the piece of apple, and he watched the line of her throat constrict as she swallowed it down. The eye contact resumed and stretched on, until Vic broke off to take in the rest of him as if she'd forgotten what he looked like. Walt tried to keep his breathing steady as her gaze raked over him, lingering on his uncharacteristic footwear choice of beat-up hiking boots.

"Okay," she said doubtfully.

Walt casually picked up the tin, which his deputy may or may not have correctly suspected was full of high-quality marijuana, slipping it into his back jeans pocket as he levered himself to a standing position. Picking up the plate holding the abandoned half-sandwich, he ran his free hand over the back of his neck and briefly chewed the inside of his bottom lip.

"You want some coffee?" Remembering his manners, Walt offered his hand to help his visitor up from the ground.

Vic stared at the hand for a long moment, indecisive. Slowly, her fingers slid inward and across his palm until her thumb was cradled next to his and Walt could grip her smaller appendage securely. His balance was slightly off and he used a bit too much force when pulling her upward, causing her to sway toward him momentarily. Her free hand shot out, coming into contact with his cotton-covered chest muscle as she steadied herself.

When she drew back, Vic's lips twisted to the side in a gesture Walt recognized as an apprehensive one. He thought for sure she was going to refuse, get back in her truck and leave him to his own devices now that she'd ascertained his welfare. But it seemed his day was destined to be a constant string of surprises.

"Sure, coffee sounds good."

Yes, this is a serious fan fiction story about Walt smoking weed. I'm as surprised as you are, but I've always been intrigued by the scene where Walt and Jamie are talking about Martha and Walt says, "Thanks for how you helped her." Hmm… One of the many small mysteries of the Longmire household, I guess you could say!

This is eventually headed into Walt/Vic shipping territory, in case anyone was wondering… drop me a review and let me know your thoughts so far! I wonder how Vic will feel about Walt's newly acquired habit… what do you guys think?