Raylan looked down at his phone and then up at the house in front of him. Judging by the black SUV parked in the short driveway ahead of him, Raylan was pretty sure this was the right place. The address on the rusty mailbox matched the address he'd found in the directory at the office.

See, he'd realized before he'd left the elevator at the Marshal building that he actually didn't know where he was going. It'd struck him as odd, too. He knew Rachel's place; he'd been there for a couple cookouts and birthdays and such. He knew where Art lived from a good handful of football games and barbeques and all that other after-hours shit that people did.

It wasn't like he didn't see Tim outside of work, either. Tim was usually at the office get-togethers, and more than a few times had found the two of them getting to know each other in a biblical sense after-hours – a lot more lately, now that he thought about it. Just last week, they'd ended up back at Raylan's after a couple of bourbons and beers, and before then, it'd been the old motel, in the back of Raylan's car…hell, they'd even christened the Marshall station locker rooms once or twice.

It had just never been at Tim's.

But he'd found it. It had taken half a tank of gas and more wrong turns than he could count, but he was there, sitting in the driveway.

He hadn't really known what to expect on the drive, but looking at the place, it looked just about like Tim's style. Not too big, not too small, it was a nice one-story brick-and-panels number with a porch and a decent sized yard that was admirably well-kept. He wouldn't have pegged Tim as the yard work kind of fella, but then, Tim liked things around him to look nice. His shiny black SUV was proof of that.

For a moment, he considered not going in. Tim might've had a reason for not inviting people. Maybe he was a private kind of guy – didn't like people in his space.

But no. He'd come here for a reason. That feeling in his gut was still there, and he reckoned there had to be a reason for it.

Besides, he hadn't come all the way here just to turn around. He'd come here to make sure there wasn't something going on with Tim, and he was going to do it.

Getting out of his car, Raylan made his way to the front door. There wasn't a doorbell, so he went for knocking.

When the knocking didn't get a response, he tried calling for the other man. "Tim," he said. "Tim, it's Raylan. I know you're here; I can see your TV on."

Tim still didn't answer the door, though, and Raylan was starting to get uneasy. It wasn't like the guy couldn't hear him – he was being loud enough, and Tim had a sharp pair of ears on him.

He should've heard him.

He should've answered the damn door.

So why the hell hadn't he?

"Tim! Tim, you got a second to answer me before I let myself in." He wasn't bluffing, either. Generally, Raylan didn't like walking into a house uninvited, but desperate times and all that. The trick was figuring out how to do it.

He checked the usual hidey holes where people kept their keys, though he wasn't real optimistic. Something told him Tim wouldn't keep anything in the usual places. Trying to pilfer paper clips from his desk had shown Raylan that plenty of times over.

Not that he made a habit of stealing Tim's office supplies.

Course, practice made perfect, and Raylan had gotten pretty good at figuring out how Tim's head worked. At least, he'd gotten as good as anyone could; Tim had a way of thinking that Raylan was starting to believe was impossible for anyone to get their head around one hundred percent.

That wasn't a criticism, though. He actually kind of liked that about him.

"I'll be damned," he said as his fingers found cool metal. He'd squatted down to look under the doorframe – because sticking it on the top would've been a little too run-of-the-mill for his favorite sniper – and found the key jammed inside a little crack in the wood. It took some wiggling to get it out, but Raylan managed and stood, triumphant, to unlock the door.

The click of the lock felt like an earthquake in his hand, and Raylan pushed the door open to step inside.

The first thing he noticed was the smell. It was subtle, earthy, with just the faintest hint of metal and gun oil – a smell so uniquely Tim that Raylan could almost see the other man in the room with him.

Only, he wasn't. There in the room, that was. The door opened into a living room, and there was a TV on and a mass of blankets on a worn leather couch that suggested someone might've been there not long ago, but no actual body to prove it.

There was some stuff, though, that told Raylan a bit. A trash can, brimming with balled-up tissues, a box of Kleenexes, a half-empty glass of water, and a handful of pill bottles on the corner of the table for everything from cold and sinus to nausea medicine.

So, he was sick. Real sick, from the looks of things.

"Well, shit," Raylan said, and he started towards the hall. "Tim? Tim, you okay? Where are you?"

No response.

Raylan glanced one way down the hall into what looked like a kitchen. Didn't look like anyone was there, so he decided the other way was his best bet. He figured the bedroom was probably down at the end of the hall, and that maybe Tim was in there sawing logs, too drugged up to hear him come in.

He went to investigate, only he didn't quite make it to the end of the hall like he'd been planning. He stopped about halfway down; there was an open door to his left, and over the dull murmur of the television in the living room, he could hear soft sounds like creaking linoleum and what sounded an awful lot like retching.

Gut reaction – maybe not the best choice of words, in hindsight – had Raylan reaching for the door with every intention of walking on in, but at the last second, he thought better of it. No telling what kind of state Tim was in, decent or otherwise, and he was of the opinion that what a man did in his bathroom was best left between him and God, unless the situation said otherwise.

So, instead, he leaned up against the wall and gave the door a soft knock. "You okay in there?" he called. He did the best to breathe through his nose as he did; even standing outside the door, the smell was enough to drop the flies off a pig's ass.

Alright, maybe that was a little harsh. Still, he wouldn't be taking any deep breaths anytime soon if he could help it.

His question was met with a few more gags that, for all Raylan had seen and heard, were still enough to curl his stomach a little bit, before the flush of a toilet signaled what Raylan hoped was a truce between Tim and his sour stomach.

Sure enough, a few seconds later, he got a real response. "Raylan?" It was definitely Tim's voice, but damned if it didn't sound terrible. Shaky, hoarse, strained…shit awful, and miserable to boot.

"Yeah, Tim, it's me." His own voice came out sounding a little like a sigh, although he couldn't say for the life of him why. Maybe he was frustrated with Tim for lettin' it get this bad – because even without seeing the guy, all the signs pointed to Tim being in a pretty bad way.

Or maybe he was frustrated with himself, for just about the same reason. He'd known Tim was in a bad way when he'd seen him Friday, and it'd taken him until, what, three in the afternoon the next Monday to do something about it?

Or hell, maybe he was just worried. See, as hard-pressed as he was to admit it – to himself, much less to Tim – Tim was more than just a good go 'round to pass the night. He was more than just a warm body to fill the bed empty space in the bed (or shower, or counter, or back seat). Raylan was…well, he was quite fond of him. The thought of him being sick or hurt or anything other than his usual odd-but-charming self just didn't sit right.

"So," he began, his eyes fixed pointedly on the kitchen down the hall instead of through the crack in the door, "you didn't answer my question."

He heard a sniff behind the door, followed by a thick, wet cough that didn't sound altogether healthy and lasted entirely too long. It was a good few seconds before Tim was even able to manage a clipped, "what?"

Raylan frowned deeper. Either Tim's brain wasn't firing on all eight cylinders, or those cold meds sitting on the table were gumming up the works a lot worse than Raylan figured they would.

"I asked if you were okay." Though the asking seemed a bit moot, the more time Raylan hung around.

His suspicions were all but confirmed when Tim let out a choked little chuckle that could've just as easily been a gag. "Peachy." The word ended in a sneeze, that somehow managed to be loud as a gunshot and still kind of pitiful at the same time. The groan that followed was even worse.

"Alright, that's it." A man's business in the bathroom was his business, sure, but Tim sounded like he had one foot in the grave in there, and that made it Raylan's business, too. His announcement of, "I hope you're decent in there," was all the warning he gave before pushing the door open.

It was the smell that hit him first. What had been bad out in the hall was worse in the cramped little bathroom, and Raylan's first order of business was to flip the fan on. It smelled like sweat and vomit in there, and Raylan figured the first step to helping Tim out didn't involve him dropping next to the pot and throwing up with him.

Fortunately – or, perhaps unfortunately, depending on whose perspective one was going by – the smell wasn't his biggest problem for long. Soon as Raylan laid eyes on the man he'd been looking for, he had worse things than the smell to trouble him.

"Jesus Christ, Tim," he breathed, albeit not too deeply. "What the hell're you doing?"

Tim, for his part, looked about as happy to see Raylan as Raylan was to see him. The poor guy looked like hell warmed over, sitting there in his too-big flannel shirt, worn-out undershirt, and jeans. His cheeks were flushed, but his skin was sheet pale and slicked with a thin sheen of sweat that didn't quite seem to go with the shivers Raylan could see even from where he was standing. Hair mussed up and one side of his shirt hanging off his lithe shoulders, he was a pitiful little picture, especially hugging the toilet like he was.

It was his eyes, though, that really gave him away. Bloodshot, sunken, and fever-bright, they were the eyes of someone that hadn't had a good night's sleep in days and seemed to know relief wasn't close in coming.

His jaw worked visibly beneath a shadow of stubble as he regarded Raylan with his downright pitiful-looking baby blues. "What's it look like," he grumbled.

"Well…" Raylan sighed, taking a few steps in and kneeling down next to Tim on the linoleum. "I'm no doctor, but in my humble opinion, it looks like you're having a pretty shitty day."

That actually earned a bit of a smile from Tim, weak as it was. "That's why—" His reply was interrupted by a harsh, wracking cough that seemed to rattle in his chest and shake the rest of him like a penny on an old washing machine. He didn't cover his mouth so much as turn his whole head towards the toilet bowl to cough, and when it ended in a gag, Raylan figured he had a pretty good idea why.

Mercifully, for both their sakes, nothing came up. Still, Raylan decided that'd be as good a time as any to grab a rag from the stack of towels on the shelf over the toilet and wet it with cool water. By the time he knelt back down, Tim was spitting something into the toilet and wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

That, Raylan decided, would be the next order of business: getting Tim into some clean, dry, not-sweat-slash-spit-slash-assorted other bodily fluids-covered clothes.

In the meantime, Raylan folded up the damn rag and laid it across the back of Tim's neck. "Easy," he said when the younger man flinched, "it's just a washcloth."

It was kind of hard to place the look in Tim's watery eyes at that, but Raylan figured it fell somewhere between confused, amused, and exasperated.

"Raylan, what're you doing here?" he said in a voice so bone dry and dead tired Raylan nearly felt ten pounds heavier just hearing it.

All the same, he donned a cheeky smile and moved the cool cloth from Tim's neck to the side of his face. "What's it look like?"

"What? You gonna nurse me back to health?" Tim shot back. Granted, it lost a lot of its bite when a sniffle set off a sneeze that had Tim doubling back over the toilet dry-retching. His whole body seized up with the force of it, and before Raylan knew what he was doing, he was rubbing the smaller man's back through his sweat-dampened shirts.

"That's what it looks like," Raylan told him. He had half a mind to add that he didn't see anyone else lining up for the job, but for so many reasons, he didn't. For one, it seemed like kind of a low blow for someone a heave short of throwing up a kidney.

But mostly, it just wasn't true. He wasn't there because he had to be; he was there because Tim was sick, and damn it, if he couldn't fix it – like he'd said, he wasn't a doctor – then damn it, he was at least going to do what he could for him. Even if that was just keeping him close to comfortable and keeping him from drowning in a puddle of his own vomit.

As Tim started to get his insides back in order, Raylan let his hand go from his back to his forehead. The heat he felt there made him frown. "You're burnin' up."

Tim, bless his heart, actually leaned into Raylan's hand, a hint of a smile on his ashen face. "Never seemed t' mind b'fore," he mumbled weakly.

"You're a riot."

Tim made a soft noise that sounded like 'mhh hmm' in the back of his throat and let his eyes slide closed. Poor guy was wiped clean out; had to be.

Unfortunately, "Sorry, sunshine, but you can't sleep in here."

It was hard to tell if Tim just couldn't be assed enough to open his eyes all the way, or if he was trying to glare. "Camp's made," was his grumbled reply, and he lifted his hand from where it rested on the seat of the toilet to wave vaguely to the pile of blankets beside him. He had himself a regular little pallet made from the looks of it.

Which raised the troubling question of just how long Tim had been in here doing the Hoakey Croakey.

"So's the couch," was Raylan's response. "How long's it been since anything came up?"

Tim's brows furrowed. "What?" He really was awfully sluggish. That made Raylan nervous.

"Never mind," he said. From the looks of Tim and from what he'd seen, the guy couldn't have had much to throw up anyway. There was a trashcan in the living room if worst came to worst, but a cold linoleum floor was no place for a sick person. "You think you can stand?"

"I ain't dyin', Raylan."

Could've fooled him, Raylan thought, but he kept that to himself. Instead, he took the washcloth from Tim's neck and put it up on the sink before standing himself and offering Tim a hand up.

Mercifully, Tim took it without protest and let Raylan haul him up onto his feet. He got the impression he tried to help as much as he could, which, given how little that ended up being, really only worried him more. He tottered on his feet once he finally managed to get on them, but after a second, he seemed steady.

More or less.

"Think you can stay up long enough to take a shower without drowning or something?" was Raylan's next question. Because as fond as he was of Tim, days of sickness and general lack of upkeep had left him a little ripe. He figured washing and some clean clothes might even do him some good.

Tim actually had the gusto to roll his eyes. "Seriously, Ray, I ain't—"

"Dying. I know," Raylan said. "And I'd kind of like to keep it that way, if you don't mind. So, I repeat: can you stand enough to take a shower, or am I gonna hear a thud soon as I close this door and come in to find you cracked your head open or some shit?"

"I reckon I can manage," Tim muttered dryly.

Raylan wasn't exactly convinced, but he also knew better than to try to coddle his…whatever Tim was to him – because he was starting to get the feeling sometimes-lover, or even lover period was…inadequate. If Tim could handle a shower, he could reevaluate and they'd go from there.

"Alright," he said finally. "I'll leave you to it, then. Holler if you need me."

"Yes, dear."

Raylan decided he would take the sass as a good sign. With a tip of his head, he ducked out of the bathroom and pulled the door to behind him. "Better not lock this," he called through it.

"Figured I'd just jump out the window."

Somehow, Raylan doubted he'd make it very far. "You do that," he said. In the meantime, he had a phone call to make.