Author's Note: A friend suggested tackling a typical fanfiction scenario: a cave-in or a broken elevator with two characters stuck together. I got thinking about family road trips...must be summer.

On the Cutting Room Floor – Boogie Dark

"I spy with my little eye something that is…black."

The voice, though it sounded small, completely unthreatening, wanting and perhaps a bit desperate tiptoeing through the utter darkness, still managed to irritate, and Raylan swatted at it.

"Don't start," he grumped, eyelids pressed against the outer bony edges of his eye sockets as he opened them wider trying to see the source of his irritation. All that was there however was blackness, and a sigh falling between them. "I'm not in the mood."

Then a huff of amusement and the small voice again maneuvering carefully through the oppressive silence of nothingness and thousands of tons of rock, "How many Marshals does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"

"Fuck off, Tim."

"Nope. Wrong answer," Tim lobbed back, aiming blindly across the tunnel. "I don't have a fucking clue how many Marshals it'd take, but I'd pay good money to find out right now." He followed up his joke with a chuckle for his efforts. It was a lonesome chuckle.

Raylan rolled his eyes, his imagination conjuring the stupid grin on Tim's face. Of course he couldn't see it but that wouldn't stop it being there and it annoyed him all the same. He felt around for a small pebble and whipped it in the direction of the sniggering. It ricocheted off rock, bounced off rock, landed and rolled on rock.

Tim couldn't pass up the opportunity to annoy Raylan further. "Missed."

"Maybe I wasn't aiming at you."

"Maybe I wasn't talking to you."

It gave Tim an idea though, something to do other than fidget and complain. He felt around on the ground beside him and picked up a handful of small rocks.

"Don't," Raylan warned, listening to the shuffling across from him.

"Don't worry, I'm not aiming at you," said Tim and a pebble bounced off the wall to Raylan's right.

"Tim," another warning.

"Hey, this is like echo-location."

Another ping, closer this time, another warning. "Tim."

"You know this really works. I could be a bat," Tim answered cheerfully and the next one hit Raylan's shoulder.

"Tim!"

"Okay," Tim muttered. The sound of pebbles dropping harmlessly to the cave floor signaled a truce.

But then Raylan picked up the thread of an argument they'd started and abandoned an hour earlier. "Next time you try to diffuse a bomb, I'm running the opposite direction from you when you yell run, or maybe I'll just start running before you touch the goddamn thing, then with any luck I'll end up on the opposite side of the cave-in from you. Didn't pay any attention in explosives training in the army, did you? Probably too busy thinking up stupid-ass one-liners."

"Raylan, they taught me how to blow shit up, not un-blow shit up. It was just 'stick a wire here and yeehaw.' The finer art of diffusing was left to the bomb squad. You need a PhD in balls and some messed up wiring yourself for that shit."

Raylan didn't respond so Tim added some more detail.

"I did pay attention in improvised munitions training. That was fun. I can tell you the best place to set your explosives to cause maximum casualties in a building, but I'm fucked if I'm one of the assholes in the building and don't have an EOD specialist handy."

Raylan shifted himself slightly and wiped at a few rocks under his butt then settled again. "Doesn't strike me as smart to set a bunch of kids loose with bombs and not teach them how to diffuse them."

Now Tim was irritated. "Maybe you want to write SpecOps command and bitch to them. While you're at it, you might want to add advanced medical training to your demands so we can undo bullet wounds as well as bombs." He had one pebble left and whipped it hard across the tunnel. It bounced straight back and skipped across the floor almost to his feet.

"Touchy," said Raylan.

"Next time you get to pick which wire to pull," Tim replied, mulish. "I told you to call Boyd Crowder."

"Boyd Crowder," Raylan repeated the name adding some disdain and astonishment. "I'm a federal US Marshal and you want me to call a known criminal for help?"

"And you haven't before?"

"Only when I had no choice."

Tim screwed up his face and threw out his arms to encompass the entire mess they were currently in. It was lost on Raylan, sitting fifteen feet away in the black and pitch of earth and rock. Tim reverted to words. "Does total goat-fuck not suggest a lack of choice?"

"You said you had experience with explosives."

"I did not," Tim griped. "You said, 'you're the military dude, you deal with it.'"

Raylan decided to be mature. "Arguing is pointless."

Ten minutes passed, ten minutes of light and steady breathing. Eventually Tim started shuffling around.

"What are you doing?" Raylan asked, suspicious.

"Making myself comfortable. I'm gonna nap."

"You're gonna nap?"

"Is there something else I should be doing?"

"You're going to nap?" Raylan repeated. "Doesn't this bother you?"

"Yeah, it bothers me, Raylan. I'd rather be home watching a game and drinking a beer. But shit happens and what the hell am I supposed to do about it? I'm not gonna sit here and freak out. It's not like I'm afraid of the dark or anything."

Raylan felt Tim had a point and settled in himself. "So what are you afraid of?"

"Not much in this world. You?"

"Likewise."

Tim lay out on his back and slid an inch one way then the other, trying to get an angle that didn't have a sharp outcropping jabbing upward, gave up finally and made do with the least uncomfortable spot.

"So you're not afraid of much in this world, how 'bout the next?" Raylan asked continuing the line of questioning to pass time.

"I don't buy into Judgment Day. I can't believe God would go all-in on what he knows is a losing hand."

Raylan snorted. "Well, this is a first. I'm going to agree with you about something."

"I'm petrified of reincarnation though. I'd probably come back as a Harlan native as part of some cosmic joke."

"So really, there's nothing you're afraid of."

"What's the point of being afraid?"

"There's absolutely nothing that Tim Gutterson is afraid of?"

A huff and shuffling and Raylan figured Tim was sitting up again.

"What are you afraid of, Raylan?"

"Dying like a pathetic mouse in a blocked up hole," he snarled.

Tim let that one lie – he understood and wouldn't mock honest fear. Fear was contagious, like a virus, often a product of influence more than anything and Raylan had worked among miners.

"I'm afraid of being captured," Tim offered after a pause, trading secrets. "It still gets me if I'm cornered or someone grabs me."

"But this dark doesn't bother you?"

"Nope."

"And heights don't bother you?"

"Nope."

"Spiders?"

"Nope."

"I know snakes don't."

Raylan's tone had changed – more friendly, reaching – and Tim responded to it by reaching back with some honesty. "A tally."

"What?" Raylan couldn't make sense of the word in context.

"I'm afraid of a tally of my bullets, of someone – and it would have to be someone omniscient – setting up a white board like we do in the office when we're tracking a case, and on it they'd put the face of everyone I've ever killed and I'd have to look at it."

"But you already know who's on it."

"No, Raylan, I don't. I know there are bullets of mine out there that found targets that I wasn't even shooting at. That's war, right? And some of those targets that I was aiming at were so far away I never saw their faces. I just know there'd be some on there that I'd be afraid to look at."

"Tim, you can't think about it like that. That's a whole different set of rules out there. Stop judging yourself by some civilian moral code."

Tim gathered up his stock of sarcasm, and it was substantial considering how much he liberally doled out daily on the job, and said, "Gee, Raylan, thanks. I feel so much better about it all now."

Raylan pictured the head tilt that went with it and he surprised himself feeling a bit badly for Tim. He had no other consolation to offer so he shared something of himself. "I'm just afraid of becoming Arlo or maybe being Arlo all along."

"I doubt you'll die in prison, Raylan."

"Well, that's not exactly the point, is it?"

"No."

The silence hummed with regrets. It was as if the rocks were sympathetic or maybe the opposite, a gallery of onlookers muttering condemnation. Raylan miraculously still had his hat and fingered the brim in a circle like a string of prayer beads. Tim slid back to the floor of the tunnel and tried to close his eyes but the blackness behind his eyelids was no relief from the blackness of them wide open.

After a while, Tim sat up again, restless, spoke to break up the humming. "Maybe if I was a Minecraft character I could pickaxe my way out…aw fuck it – with the luck I'm having today I'd run into a mob of creepers or zombies."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"You never played that game?"

"What game?"

"Never mind. I keep forgetting you're old."

Raylan huffed and threw a pebble in Tim's direction. It ricocheted off rock, bounced again off rock, landed and rolled on rock.

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