singillatim

Who: Raylan and you!
What: The September Event
When: Month long catch all
Where: Milton

Content Warnings: NPC Death, gore, gun violence

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Around town - Pre-event

Finally, the slow ache of Milton was really starting to wear Raylan down. It had taken a few months, a few kicks in his metaphorical gut that he'd weathered graciously, but even he was starting to get restless with his busywork and sleep. He was outside more often than he was indoors, a thick scarf tucked into his buttoned up wool jacket as he travels around delivering corded bundles of firewood to a few other houses and then finally, the Community Hall. While he's there, he goes ahead and posts up a message on the community board, taking a few minutes to read over any new messages posted before he and Goose, the wolf pup that is now a permanent fixture at his side, go back about their day.

Painful Reminders

The buzz of voices, of static maybe, of something out there is what draws Raylan out night after night to stare into the sky at the dancing lights that would have otherwise amazed him for their beauty. Part of him was sure he was going insane again, expecting Arlo to show up from behind his shoulder to whisper dark nothings in his ears again, to send more terrors into his nightmares. But the longer he stood out there fiddling with the silver horseshoe ring on his right hand ring finger, the clearer the voices got, and after a while, he just... closes his eyes and bathes in the familiar, far away voices. Pretends, for a moment, that he was that 8 year old boy again, listening to his mother and Aunt talk in the kitchen over the smells of fried chicken and cornbread - his favorite meal.

His throat tightens up and he focuses on breathing as the looming silence of the night, somehow with its own weight underneath the voices he knew weren't really there, pressed in on him like it aimed to force him to speak, to answer back.

It got worse after the first night - he woke up with an ultrasound in his hands, - Girl, Hawkins it read in fine print at the top - the same one that he would be found standing out with the next night and the night after that, thumb working over again and again, soaking in the painful loneliness of his life, his job, the guilt of the danger they would both be in, the shit father he was sure he was gonna be despite any or all of his efforts. His fate, maybe. Punishment for what he was, what he tried not to be. A Givens. This would be the rest of his days, as long as he lived.

The Enemy Within

The Aurora had left Raylan in a dour mood, expression closed and stormy and his head swivels a little weirdly when it turns sharply to one side, like a rooster in a bird yard looking for something invading his territory. The carcasses on the street screamed warning, screamed bloody danger and it sent all of his neck hairs up on end. They unsettled him even more than he already was. The house had been broken into, overturned while he and Goose had been out checking his few snares one day, and he was kept up by the sounds of something else being broken. It felt like a jab each time, shoved behind his eyeballs every time he started to drift off to sleep, forcing him back to his feet to look out the window with a gun in his hands.

It was starting to effect him out and about. One broken window on top of everything else had been enough to top his frustrations and send him and his wild hairs right up to people he didn't know.

"Hey - yeah, you. How long you been in town for? Know anythin' about these animals bein' left around?" The thing about Raylan was that he never raised his voice. It never got loud beyond a little projection to clear distance, but he didn't really need to. He knew how to put an edge into it.

As the month wears on, as the attacks continues, more than once Raylan comes busting out of his house in the middle of the night to yell.

"JUST COME OUT AND FINISH IT INSTEAD'A HIDIN' IN THE DARK LIKE COWARDS." Come out, where he could defend himself properly. He knew it wouldn't do him any good. That didn't matter.

Bad Blood

a. The Beginning
Raylan had been getting ready for this. He didn't know when it was going to happen or what it was going to look like - but he kept his guns loaded and had been lucky enough to find some extra bullets on top of what he's already got. Goose was hidden away under his house right now and his fear for the young pup was as spiked as his tight awareness of every single body that he should manage. Of course this was going to happen, with the kidnapping, with the theft, with the careless way the community had handled the Forest talkers. Those guns weren't the only thing on him though; a chair leg with a handful of nails beaten into it was living in his left hand and a knife hung off his belt. Raylan had never been in the military, but he had seen his own kind of hollar wars and this was really no different than Company Men or Crowder's boys making an assault on what they thought was weak. They had a lesson to learn.

He had to try and keep the street as safe as he was able - he had to get into the fray, take down as many of these people as he possibly could to stop the assault.

"HEY," he yells at someone attacking a house, striding towards them as sure and confident as ever. It only took a raised weapon in his direction before Raylan was pulling his gun and shooting - every shot hit it's mark. The heart.

b. The Fray
It was all the sound of screams and destruction that faded first, leaving nothing but the rapid heartbeat in his ears. He saw a threat, he fired, they fell. If they were unlucky enough to be within 50 feet, Raylan let them come and fought. The splatter of blood across his face and body didn't phase him right now and he didn't hear the noise, there was work to be done and he could process it later. Each face was an exercise in a momentary decision. Where they destroying part of Milton? Fighting against people he knew or almost trusted, people he's started to worry for in the general sense? Threat. Target.

Corpse.

His gut had twenty plus years of this kind of gauging. Anyone that wanted to tear down Milton, to tear them down, was going to have a hellva a fight on their hands. Anyone he could save, anyone he could usher to safety, he would - They were the reason he was fighting as hard as he was, for those less capable than he was to protect someone in a moment in a way they couldn't.

c. The End

His focus finally came onto the cult leader - the one driving the charge, the one leading men and women to their own destruction. How many bodies were they going to have to bury after this? But that was after and all Raylan was focused on was now. Vengeance. An inarguable statement that might strike some fear into those Forest Talkers that survived, that might break through their fanaticism. Killing their leader would certainly be a path towards that.

Raylan tracks the man across the battlefield of Milton, across the charge against them all and into the cabin with whomever else is also smart enough to hone in on the man. He's not furious enough to kill the man as soon as he stops fighting, and he's more than willing to stare down a dying man and watch the light go out of his eyes. It doesn't phase him one bit - the hard cold truths of life were that they would all end up this way. Dead in the snow, bleeding out in one way or another.