Disclaimer: Justified ain't mine. Sadly. Comments welcome.

Author Note:This was written for norgbelulah's excellent Summer In Harlan fic meme at LiveJournal. The prompt for this story was: Boyd, Raylan - church.

Earth to Earth

It's a good five minute walk from the rough track where he left the town-car down to the clearing. Last time, as he'd approached, there had been the smell of wood-smoke and cooking. A surprisingly appetising smell, earthy, wholesome.

Now it's just damp leaves and rain-soaked air. Everything glistens with droplets and the sky is heavy grey and hanging low over the trees. This little patch of world is so still that he doesn't see the person he's come to find until he's on top of him, a dark figure on the ridge, shoulders hunched against the wind that's picked up behind the rain.

'Ava tell you where to find me?'

Boyd doesn't turn around, speaks into the silence and Raylan feels a twinge of annoyance that Boyd doesn't just seem to know he is there, he also knows he is there. 'She call ahead?'

He glances back then and there is a faint curl at the corner of his mouth. 'Reception is not entirely reliable up here, Raylan. No, Ava did not inform me of your visit.'

He refuses, point blank, to ask how, in that case, Boyd knew; if only because he knows Boyd will take great pleasure in telling him and he isn't in the mood to hear it. He's never in the mood. He climbs up the slope of the ridge, takes in the spread of the clearing below.

There are still tents, sagging, the skeleton structures buckled under the flapping bright nylon skins. Bits of lives strewn across the ground: scraps of muddied clothing, pieces of broken mirror, a few books.

And then there are the irregular mounds of earth, grouped together and slowly being reclaimed by the woodland: greenery traces the sides, tiny wildflowers adorning the tops.

'You never knew any of my men, did you, Raylan, outside of the information held in your many files?'

'There's always Dewey Crowe,' he says, and they both smile slightly and there is a brief unity in their mutual astonishment at the hapless Dewey's ongoing existence. 'No, I didn't know them.'

'Otis,' Boyd says, inclines his head towards one of the mounds as though he can still see the person it represents, 'he was illiterate. Couldn't even spell his own name, and when he did he got the S back to front. We were teaching him to read. You have to wonder how a man can live his whole life and go to school and leave that establishment and still be unable to read a word, not one word.'

'That is a tragedy,' he says, after a moment.

There's a breathy sound, almost like a laugh, but when Raylan looks at him, at what he can see of Boyd's face in profile, there is no laughter there.

The trees are old, tall, great trunks reaching up to the sky and their canopies a vault decorated in the burnished golds and deep reds of early fall. Birdsong now and then, and stillness and peace.

'It's a beautiful place for a church.'

'This isn't a church, Raylan, it's a graveyard.' Boyd turns to him fully then, his eyes dark, fires banked down low and his face controlled and calm in a way that Raylan doesn't quite trust. 'What was it you wanted with me?'

He reaches for the hardness that slips from him so rarely, especially where Boyd is concerned - digging coal notwithstanding - the thing that drives him through these encounters. He thinks about Helen, because that will do it every time, and then, unbidden, he thinks about the being down in the hole and summer nights and moonshine up in the hills and a lot of things that he doesn't want to think about at all.

Shit.

'It'll keep,' he says.

And after a moment he takes off his hat, holds it against his chest and they stand in silence.