templemarker

we call it full grown
by templemarker

Notes: for bunnymcfoo in the Fall Fandom Free For All. Her request was: Ray/Walt. I’d really really really love to hear about Walt slowly and with great deliberation seducing the living fuck out of Ray. Here’s the templemarker variation. You may not know this, but marcolette is the Stig.

***

Ray’s been out for three months when the first postcard arrives.

WISH YOU WERE HERE.

He doesn’t recognize the handwriting, not that it would be easy anyway since it’s in capital lettered black sharpie. The caption on the card says it’s from Puerto Rico, a nice picture of the coast off Puerto Real. “The fuck is this,” he mutters to himself, walking back into his apartment. He’d think it was Brad except the fucker didn’t even take vacation after they got back, just drove for a day up and down the coast and then went back to work.

Who the fuck would sent him a postcard?

The second arrives on the heels of the first, this one from Miami, stamped a week ago. YOU’D LIKE THE MOJITOS the card announces in the same unrecognizable print, a picture of happy pretty drunk people advertising a bar on the front. Ray thumbs the picture on the card where the post office has messed up the image with their bar code, and wonders.

The third is a weird, fucked-up picture of a tree cut in half by lightning, and Ray snorts when he sees it. Ray said a lot of shit when he was high as fuck on Ripped Fuel, and he doesn’t regret about ninety percent of it, either. There was one time when they were driving up Highway 7 in fucking pitch-black Iraqi night, only artillery highlighting the scene and showing up in the corner of his vision wearing his NVGs, and he said some bullshit about lightning and how much he fucking missed thunderstorms when he was stationed in Pendleton. This looks like a thing he was describing, a tree divided by something more powerful than itself, and Ray doesn’t remember a lot of the shit he said but he remembers that.

Probably Trombley isn’t sending him the cards.

On the back it says PLACE YOUR BETS and that makes exactly zero fucking bullshit sense until four days later when a second card shows up with the single most cliched image of Vegas Ray could have cooked up in his sober fucking head. RED OR BLACK it says, and fucking Reporter isn’t sending him the cards because this is a conversation he had with one person, one time, before insomnia and insanity and the necessity of being fucked up all the time to stay unfucked changed all the shit that came out of his mouth into something messy and unfiltered.

He and Walt didn’t know each other real well before they deployed–they played against each other in baseball a couple times, but it was just face recognition. After Bravo was built from three people up, and the LT divided them up into teams that would fit the stupid fucking tin cans they drove through the desert, Brad told Teams 2-1 Alpha and 2-1 Bravo to go out and socialize and proceeded to ignore all of them and read Wired in his rack instead.

The rest of them went out, though, getting to know each other through munitions tests and inventory and fixing up the goddamn humvees, and that night, that first night, Ray was kind of drunk and talking about how he was going to go to Vegas after this war was over. If it’s a hundred hour war, he said, slurring his words and grinning like a dumbass, I’m going to Vegas, straight to the roulette wheel and betting everything I got.

On black or red? Walt had asked, pink with too many tequila shots and too much laughter, and Ray had leaned over into his ear and said, You pick.

It didn’t mean shit at the time, just bullshit said when drunk and not responsible for the honkey that came out of his mouth.

It means something now.

Ray waits impatiently for the last card, fucking off at work and convincing himself not to use his phone and checking the mail every goddamn fucking shit-ass day until finally a card with a vista of Vegas at night arrives, saying, in lower-case letters this time, room 628 bellagio. Ray has been checking the flights almost hourly, and he’s on his computer booking a seat and practically running out the door to catch it with enough time to call in sick to work and leave a note for his neighbor to water his plants.

The flight seems excruciatingly long, and Ray doesn’t give a shit how much money he’s burning through, he takes the first cab he can find and fidgets the whole way down to the strip. He doesn’t look at anything, no loud noises or bright lights for him, just throws money at the driver and hustles into the lobby, sprinting to the elevator.

Floor six dings, and Ray steps out, hunting his way to room 628. When he finds it, it’s exactly the same as every other door on this floor. Standing in front of it, he hesitates for a second before knocking. “Fuck it,” he says under his breath. “Fucking whatever.”

When the door swings open, Ray lets out the air he didn’t realize he’d been holding in, drops his bag to the floor, reaches a hand out to grab Walt’s shirt and reels him in. Kissing him is satisfying, like Ray has been wanting water for the last three weeks and got stuck being thirsty. Walt grabs his shoulders and pulls him into the room, kicking Ray’s shit around and not fucking letting go.

“You’ve been driving me crazy,” Ray says when Walt pushes his head to the side to get to the line of Ray’s jaw. “Fuck, you don’t even know, you’re such a bitch, Walt. I can’t believe you did that to me.”

He feels Walt laughing, squeezes him tighter. “That was kind of the point,” Walt says, biting Ray’s skin until Ray is humping his leg. “I didn’t know if you’d get it. If you’d want it. So I fucked with you.”

“You’re such a bitch,” Ray says again, this time approvingly, and kisses Walt some more. “You better have gotten this hotel room for, like, the whole goddamn week, because I’ve decided I’m betting on black.”

“I’ve decided I’m betting on you,” Walt says, laughing, and Ray locks his eyes on Walt’s wicked grin, letting himself get pushed back to the bed.