Author's Notes: Finally getting around to fix the scenes. Gods, this is frustrating.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
someday my pain will mark you (harness your blame)
part II
When he shoots his first man while on the job, Raylan doesn't even blink and neither does Aella. Pulling his gun out and shooting was more like second nature than anything, like taking another breath, and it just so happened to come about. Raylan instinctively knew the guy was going to pull on him, so that by the time he finally did, Raylan's gun was already out and the bullet was already shot.
What actually startles Raylan is when the man's daemon, a falcon of some sort, just bursts into gold dust.
He's seen men die before, on TV and when he served briefly in the Marines, but it was from a distance or surreal. The shit on TV was just special effects and in the Marines it was never up close. He didn't care much. But when he shot and killed his first man as a Marshall, the other guy's daemon practically exploded dust all over him. It fades away into nothing and he looks down at Aella, looking more confused than anything.
"Dust?" is all he can think of to say.
"Dust," Aella confirms.
He holsters his gun, pops a kink out of his neck, and swipes away at any invisible dust that might still be on his suit jacket. As Aella prowls around the body, sniffing at it and looking decidedly not bothered, Raylan calls the Chief Deputy of the Dallas office he's currently positioned at. A few other bystanders have already called 911, thinking that they've witnessed some terrible homicide, their daemons hiding behind them. Aella looks out at them with pure disdain and he gives her a nudge and a look to make her stop. If wolves could shrug their shoulders, she would have done so carelessly.
"This is gonna involve a lot of paperwork," Raylan sighs as he sits down on the curb.
"Should've thought of that before you shot the man," Aella snips.
"Hey, he pulled first," Raylan points out.
Aella sits down in front of him on her haunches. "Not really. You didn't give him much of a chance – you just sorta…shot him while he was still pullin'."
"He was gonna shoot me," Raylan says, almost to himself. You're told that shooting someone in the line of duty will bother you – it'll shake you to your core – it'll mess your shit right up. But he doesn't feel it, at least not like he thinks he should. He looks at Aella. She looks at him. (She doesn't feel it either – doesn't feel the guilt or regret seeping into her bones like he thinks they should.) "All I did was shoot him first."
"Han fuckin' Solo," Aella snorts, but it's with terrible fondness.
It's Aella that points out to Raylan that he's stupidly in love with Winona. It's also Aella that tells him that he's likely to fuck it up, but she says it with gentleness that he can't be mad at her, not one bit. (She's right, of course. She's always right.) If it isn't for her, he probably wouldn't have figured it out for himself for a few more months and then it would have taken him some more months to actually say it and she might have been long gone with a man that could actually speak how he felt properly.
As it is, she's with him; and he's not exactly the talk-about-my-mushy-feelings type.
To be honest, it's no surprise that it's taken him this long since he still doesn't even know what he and Winona are. They've gone on more than a few dates and spent half their nights in the same bed. He's dated girls before and had a few relationships, but none of them quite compare to what he's got with Winona, whatever it is. He loves her and that scares the shit out of him. He can only ever remember loving two people and that's his mother and his Aunt Helen. This is a different love though. This is a love that makes him want to call up his momma and panic on the phone to her.
And then there's Aella, who he's never seen so…calm.
She's sweet again, his Aella, and so terribly happy. He hasn't seen her look like this since he was real little; back when Arlo wasn't so cruel or at least when his mother was able to better hide the fighting. She's damn near four times the size of Winona's daemon, Charon, but she'll let him lie on her belly or lick her on the snout. Raylan can't even begin to describe or understand the stupid warm feelings he gets in his chest whenever he gets up to take a piss in the middle of the night and spots the little ocelot curled up against Aella by the bedroom door.
"You should tell her," Aella says again and again, but he can never get the words out. Can't find the right time, he always says, but that's just an excuse and they both know it. He's never told any girl that he's loved them because he didn't and he didn't think it was ever worth lying about.
He's lying in bed about an hour before he's due to get up for work, wide awake and staring at Winona's bedroom ceiling. Just when he's about to get up, maybe get something to eat, Winona rolls over to face him and opens her eyes, looking all muzzy and out of it. "Hey there," she mumbles.
"'Mornin'," he whispers back, leaning over to kiss her. She's so tired that she doesn't even push him away with a laugh to complain about his morning breath.
Tell her, Aella thinks at him hard from across the room.
"What're you doin' up so early?"
"Just thinkin'."
Tell her or I'll tell her!
Like hell you will, Raylan shoots back.
"Thinkin'? Well that don't sound good. Could be dangerous." Winona closes her eyes though, a smile on her face.
"Nothin' too bad. I love you. Go back to sleep."
For a minute, Raylan doesn't think anything of it. He closes his eyes, feigns sleep like he always does after first waking up, and thinks that he got away scot-free. There, I said it. And he feels victorious. Nothing big is made about it. No gasps, no shock, no awkward silence. Aella will admonish him once they're in the car, telling him it doesn't count, but he said it and that's all that matters. It's Winona's fault about not hearing it for falling back asleep.
"You love me?" Her voice sounds so tiny and fragile that it makes Raylan open his eyes again to look at her. She looks a little scared, which is not something that you want to see on a girl whenever you tell her that you love her.
Raylan can't think of anything to say that will comfort her. No? I was just joking? Yes? I love you – so much that I feel like I might accidentally shoot my gun if I hold it and think of you? Maybe? I've never been in love so I really don't know what it's supposed to feel like. None of those options sound like a good idea at all.
You're such shit at this, Aella grumbles as she leaps onto the bed. Winona sits up in surprise. She's eye-to-eye with Aella, who is trying her best to not look intimidating at all. But Aella's a wolf. She's nothing but intimidating. Raylan has always liked how Winona never seems terribly scared of Aella or how it's like she ignores the fact that he's got a wolf for a daemon and that's fucking weird. Except right now she does look scared and Raylan's half in mind to tell Aella to get off the bed. Such shit.
"Aella–"
But of course she does something completely off course. Aella steps forward and rubs the top of her head against Winona's neck, pressing her body into Winona's; and it nearly knocks Raylan off the bed. He's literally blown back against the mattress, gasping for air, as his soul pushes against Winona.
"Oh," Winona gasps. "You love me."
Raylan can't even choke something out. He's too messed up in the head over the way it feels to have someone else touch his daemon. The last time Aella had touched anyone but him, she'd been biting down on Arlo's arm the night she settled as a wolf. This is something completely, wonderfully different. He's never felt this before – never felt so close to a person in his fucking life. Every other emotional tie he's had seems like nothing now that Winona's fingers are digging into Aella's fur and she's practically in tears and Aella is practically humming, his soul is fucking humming…
"Of course he loves you," Aella responds. "We both love you."
It takes more strength than he can ever remember mustering, but he forces himself up and looks over at the bedroom to Winona's daemon, who is still sitting on the floor. Charon looks unsure, almost terrified, like he doesn't know what's going on. He's almost certain that he allowed Winona's last boyfriend to touch him, and maybe that's why he's so hesitant. He doesn't want Winona to get hurt again; he doesn't want to get hurt again.
"Charon?" he asks, holding out an unsteady hand. (His hand has never been unsteady. He's never had a shaky hand in his life. He's shot men, killed men, held a gun in his hands for half his life, and it's never been shaky like this.)
Winona pulls her face away from Aella's and nods her head. In the next instant, Charon is on top of the bed and pushing his head into Raylan's hand.
"Shit," Raylan hisses, because Winona's soul is in his hands. She trusts him with this, with her soul, with all that she is. Charon, who has always been distant with him no matter how close he's become with Aella, is trusting him. Winona lets out another ragged gasp, the same sound she makes whenever she's orgasming, and she clutches even tighter to Aella. With Charon leaning up against him, Raylan reaches out and grasps Winona's hand even as she holds tight to Aella's black fur. Aella licks Charon's back.
It feels like an electric bolt shoots through all of them.
After a while, everything begins to ease and they're able to lie down, one tangled mess. Aella puts most of her weight on top of him, something he's used to, but she lays her head on Winona's stomach. Charon is curled on top of Winona's chest, but his tail brushes against Raylan's arm. He never lets go of her hand; she's got her head on his shoulder; and their legs are in a somewhat painful jumble. None of them care.
"Should've done this ages ago," Aella mutters.
"Maybe if ya'll weren't as emotionally closed off as a liquor store on Sundays," Charon says back.
Winona kisses his shoulder. "I love you too, by the way."
Told you I'd tell her, Aella thinks smugly as they all drift off to sleep.
He ends up calling in for work two hours after the fact.
"You think she's settled?"
"'Course she's settled. Think I'm too stupid to know when my own daemon is settled?"
Maybe, Aella says.
Shut up.
"That's wild, Raylan," Boyd says as he crouches down to Aella's level. He's about half a foot away from her newly settled face, closer than she really lets anyone else besides Raylan get to her. The few people that have seen her and realized that she hasn't changed shapes – that recognize a settled daemon when they see one – won't get anywhere near her, but it's like Boyd doesn't even notice the sharp teeth or cold eyes. "Wow, a wolf!"
Raylan swells up with a bit of boyish pride, the kind of pride that comes with finally being settled. It's like when your voice is finally done changing from a boy's voice to a man's or you get that first major growth spurt that every boy is jealous of – except he's yet to go through either of those. All weekend, whenever he went into town, people seemed wary of him, afraid even; and while he didn't want to say it, it kind of stung a bit. When he showed up at school, parents literally pulled their kids away from him and teachers whispered to one another.
Boyd though – he seemed genuinely impressed and cool with it. "I wonder what Atha will settle as," he muses as he stands back up straight. His daemon shifts into a wolf, a light grey one, though not the size of Aella. Almost instantly the two of them begin to tumble with one another, rolling around on the trouble and pushing each other. "I like the way she can change though. Sometimes I wish she won't ever settle."
There's always that weird feeling when you get around the age of settling. Half of you wants desperately for your daemon to settle, so you can be a grown up, so you can be a man, but the other half of you never wants to grow up and you want to be able to change forever.
(Because you never truly stop changing, so why does your soul have to?)
The bell rings, letting them know that school is about to start up again. Boyd's Athaliah shifts into bird and flies onto his shoulder and then into a little Gardner snake so she can slip down into his arm sleeve. Aella just looks up at Raylan patiently. It's taking time for both of them to accept that she can't just change at a whim, but no matter what people whisper about her behind their backs, he loves her the way she is now.
"School sucks," Boyd grumbles as they head back to the building.
"S'better than bein' at home," Raylan says, more to himself. He doesn't talk about his home life with anyone, but he knows that Boyd is okay. Their dads work together – or, well, they make money together somehow or another. Boyd already knows what Arlo Givens is like so there's no sense in trying to hide it.
"Maybe so," Boyd huffs, "but I think it's a damn waste of time. Like I got nothin' better to do than just have some old bag of wind tellin' me shit I don't care about." He shakes his head. Atha peeks her head out of his shirt and looks up at him. "The real stuff – the important stuff – we can't learn in no school buildin'. We gotta learn it out there on our own, you know?"
Raylan knows – he knows exactly what the other boy is talking about – but he doesn't necessarily agree. Try as his mother might and despite his father never really talking to him, Raylan pretty much knows what his father gets up to in the middle of the night. And everyone in Harlan County knows what Bo Crowder does in these parts.
"I guess," Raylan replies.
Boyd doesn't even seem to hear Raylan's hesitance. "I mean, what're we really gonna do with the shit they tell us in here? I don't need to know about shit that happened hundreds of years ago. I can already read, write, count, and talk. But are they gonna teach us how to deal with the real shit? How to deal with people?"
He doesn't say it, doesn't have to say it. What Boyd's really saying is that school isn't going to teach him how to be a proper criminal like his papa.
I don't wanna be like Arlo, Raylan can't help but think when the teacher starts talking and Boyd is doodling and Raylan can't concentrate on what the woman is saying.
You won't be, Aella promises him, her head resting on his lap under the cramped desk. You won't be anything like him, you'll see.
"Raylan, you can't just go around shooting people!"
"That's not what I'm doin'."
"Yes, goddamnit, yes you are."
At his side, looking more dog than wolf since they're being reprimanded, Aella rolls her eyes.
"That's not helping," Deputy Chief Grant's bobcat daemon, Fallon, snaps.
Raylan can feel the waves of anger radiating off of Aella. He wants to touch her head, remind her that she needs to calm down, but he can't do that, not without letting his boss and daemon know that Aella is about a second away from losing control. She could chew Fallon up and swallow her down whole in a matter of a few bites, but she does nothing of the sort, just sits there, eyes cast downward. It's hard letting someone lower on the food chain tell you what to do – especially when that someone is higher up than you on the job ladder.
"He pulled on me. I pulled on him. He shot badly. I didn't. That's it." Raylan rolls his shoulders back, stands up straight. He wants nothing more than to get a glass of bourbon right now, hole up in some dank bar in the sunniest place on earth, but he's got to wait until his boss is finished chewing him out. Still, if Grant is expecting an apology of some sorts, he's looking at the wrong U.S. Marshal. "Everybody makes mistakes. His just happened to be a fatal one."
"Letting you transfer here out of Glynco might have been mine," Grant sighs as he sits back down behind his desk. Fallon doesn't leave the top of the desk. Her eyes are still boring deep holes into Aella's skull. "You're a good Marshal, Raylan – I'll give you that – but this is the… What? How many people have you hunted down, shot, and killed?"
"In the Miami office alone or are we also counting Salt Lake and Dallas?" Fallon asks, finally turning her attention back to her human.
Grant rubs the bridge of his nose. "Hell, I don't know."
"It's not like I ask to hunt down the fugitives that are more likely to try and kill me," Raylan points out, putting his hands on his hips underneath his suit jacket. "I don't go through the files and think, 'Hm, I wonder which one is gonna try to put a bullet in me so I can shoot first.' We deal with bad men. This is just a possible outcome, a chance we have to take when we take this job."
"A casualty of war?" Grant offers dryly.
"If you want to look at it that way."
"Well, with you, it isn't just a 'possible outcome;' it's a likely inevitability."
Raylan makes a face, one that suggests that his boss isn't entirely wrong.
"Just…go do your job."
When they return to his desk, Raylan sits down and starts the paperwork that he's become used to doing over the past few years. Three years into his time in Miami and he's shot… Well, how many men had he shot in self-defense?
Is it really self-defense when you don't give them much of a chance? Aella asks with a quirk of her ears.
He gives them a chance – he really does. They shouldn't draw on him; no one should draw on him. He's also been quicker than most people and he's always just– Well, he's just always known who is going to pull on him and who isn't. He's good at quick snap judgments, same as Aella. She'll twitch her tail a certain way, letting him know that she sees a gun that he can't, or she'll bare her teeth when she knows a man is too much of a pisser to do anything to fight back. Every man that he's ever shot has always had their hands on a gun, has always been halfway through drawing their weapon.
It's just that he and Aella can both sense when a man is going to try to kill them before the man seems to know it himself.
It's not the first time he gets a little cocky and finds himself getting tooled up by two bit thugs. Raylan's smart, in his own way, but he's got a lone wolf approach that puts even fellow Marshal's on edge. It's because of this that Raylan finds himself tied up to a chair in some sweltering Miami warehouse getting the shit beat out of him.
He spits some blood out of his mouth and shakes his head, trying to get the blood out of his eyes. "Didn't you used to be a boxer or somethin'? What kind of punch was that? You think that's why you flushed out?"
That earns him another punch, this one to the gut, and he doubles over in pain, the wind knocked right out of him.
When Raylan looks up, he can't help but glance over at Aella. They've got her tied down, the two other men's daemons circling around her. One looks like some sort of cougar, the other a ratty-looking coyote. Aella is bigger than both of them, more wild than all of them in the room put together, but they've got her back paws tied down and she's bleeding from her side and there's a muzzle on her.
A fucking muzzle. Raylan can feel his blood singing at that. He wants to kill both of these fuckers for even daring to put a muzzle of his Aella.
The two men look at each other, look at their daemons, and then back to Raylan.
No, is the only thing he can think.
Getting his ass handed to him while tied to a chair, waiting for back up to miraculously show up, is one thing, but getting tortured like that… He can see the idea forming in their eyes. It's an unspoken rule that you don't fuck with a person's daemon. You can beat the ever-living shit out of the person, but you don't touch their daemon, don't fuck with it. That's the goddamn rule of life.
First, the big man gets a rope and loops it around Aella's neck. She struggles viciously, growling underneath the muzzle, and shakes her head, but he gets it around there.
"Don't fucking touch her!" Raylan screams. It's a sign of weakness and he hates himself for it, can hear Aella yelling at him to shut up – shut the fuck up, Raylan, don't let them see you bleed – but he can't stop himself. How fucking dare they?
The man doesn't listen though. He tightens the rope around Aella's neck and Raylan can feel her, can feel himself, choking, and then the man jerks hard. Raylan jerks hard against his own ropes as Aella fights back. She begins to fight so much that the two other daemons have to pounce on her to control her. The coyote bites her neck and the cougar smacks her with its paws and she–
She can't howl. She can't snap or bite back. Instead she's howling in his head and he's howling out loud, struggling in the chair so hard that he actually falls forward and lands on his face on the cold concrete.
The second man has to jump in and starts pulling on the rope as well and they're dragging her across the floor, out of the room. She's four, five, six, seven feet away from him when he starts to feel the tug. All law enforcement officers are required to test the boundaries of distance with their daemons. Twenty feet is the regulation distance, but it hurt still and it hurts even more when you're out of each other's sight.
Raylan is still howling when they pull Aella out of the room and the doors shut, leaving him alone in the room. He can't see her and he can only hear the muffled struggles of the two men and their daemons and his heavy breathing and panicking heart and sudden screams. He's not even saying words anymore, just wild howling and awkward movements on the ground with the chair stuck on top of him. His head pounds, but it's his chest – it's his soul – he feels like he's been torn in half from the inside out. He knows somehow that they're past twenty feet, they're– god, thirty feet, thirty-five feet. He feels like he's being ripped in the middle, an inch at a time, like the seam holding his entire existence together is being systematically torn from him.
Aella, he thinks, the words reaching out blindly into the empty room. Aella, Aella, Aella.
Using his last bit of strength, Raylan slams his shoulder into the ground and shouts in pain. He does it twice more before his arm is out of socket and he's able to somehow pull himself out of his binds. It's slow and painful, but he unties his legs from the chair and raggedly forces himself to his feet. He stumbles towards the doors, gasping for breath, nearly tumbling the whole time, and then rams his shoulder again into the wall in one clean movement, knocking it back into place. (Thank God for those fights as a kid.)
He damn near falls through the door, runs into the wall, and then makes a right. He can't hear anything anymore except the blood pumping in his ears and he can barely breathe, but he knows where to go. (Home is not where the heart is. Home is where Aella is. Home is Aella. It always has been.) He wanders further down the hall, what feels like miles but is only fifty feet, and he can hear them again through the door at the end. The only reason they don't hear him coming is because they're too busy shouting at each other and fighting with a weakened but still furious Aella, who has broken the ties on her back paws.
One guy has his gun tucked into the belt of his pants. Raylan just grabs the gun without thinking and shoots the man holding onto the rope choking Aella in the back of the head. His cougar daemon explodes into dust. The other guy turns, his gun partially out, but Raylan says, "No," in a strangely calm voice and shoots the man right between the eyes. His coyote daemon yelps and vanishes into thin air.
Raylan drops the gun, drops to his knees, and holds out his hands. Aella limps over to him and he takes the muzzle off of her, throwing it to the other side of the room. "Oh," he mumbles as he presses his face into her neck, grips her bloodied fur tightly, pulls her close to him. "Oh."
She's with him. She's back with him and he feels whole again. He feels the tears inside of him slowly mending and the ache in his chest dulling. As she nuzzles against him, pressing as close to him as she can physically get, he can feel himself being sewn back together again.
"I'm sorry, Raylan," she cries – she cries. His Aella hasn't fucking cried since they were seven and they saw Limehouse damn near kill Arlo for damn near killing Francis. But she's whimpering and her whole body is shaking, like some sort of pup that's been kicked, and his chest burns, his mouth dries up, and he grips her even tighter. "I tried fighting them, but I couldn't and I–"
"It ain't nothin'," he tells her. "It ain't nothin'."
Raylan will never let anyone separate him from Aella again and they never talk about it again, never talk about how they felt like they died. How he looked like a zombie, but maybe he'd been one for a second. He's covered in blood and bruises and scratches and their blood mingles together in her fur, but neither of them care.
It should have killed them, being separated that much from each other. Raylan tells Grant that they took Aella about twenty-five feet from him before he got loose and found her again. It was sixty feet though. Sixty fucking feet of separation.
They're already wolves though. No need to add one more thing that makes them fucked up and weird.