Title: Down, to Sleep
Author: Elizabeth
E-mail: uhmidont@yahoo.com
Fandom: "Way of the Gun"
Category: Slash, Longbaugh/Parker
Disclaimer: I certainly don't own the characters. The dialogue in this story is from the movie and was written by Christopher McQuarrie.
Distribution: Please ask.
Note: This fic takes place before/during the scene outside the hotel right after Longbaugh, Parker, and Robin play Hearts--the DVD calls this chapter "Framed."
Thanks: To Fionna for the beta--and for liking the movie as much as I do. <g>
January 19, 2001

Longbaugh leaves the hotel room and stands by the van, waiting. He lights a cigarette and watches the window, watches the shadows moving around inside. Parker will come to him. He always does.

He'd laid the girl bare after he came back to the room, after he heard Parker's voice through the door. Parker was laughing, almost, and his voice had dropped into his drawl, the one he used when he was noticing someone. It made Longbaugh angry, but just a little.

It was just a little because he'd expected it and also because he knew what to do. He'd gone back into the room, watched as they scattered, Parker moving away from the girl, his eyes darting to the pile of the cards on the bed and then up briefly, barely meeting Longbaugh's gaze. Longbaugh ignored all of that and picked up the cards, talked about the game of hearts. Parker followed eventually, his voice falling in behind Longbaugh's; clarifying rules, making points and for a second everything was almost right back to where it should be. But only almost, not there.

Then the girl started talking. Longbaugh let her. He'd known she was going to do--it was the only ploy she had left--and so he retreated to a corner, to give her that moment. He hadn't known what she was going to say, of course, though most of it wasn't a surprise. Any deal always got fucked up. It was a given. But still, by the end, as she wept, pulling Parker's hand to her belly so he could feel her child kick, Longbaugh knew things had shifted again. The baby spoke to Parker, somehow. He could see it in the way Parker's mouth moved, in the way his eyes dropped away from Longbaugh's and became distant, glazed.

So he went over and grabbed his things. The girl turned, grabbing his hand, but she and the baby meant nothing to him. He saw the calculation behind those tear-filled eyes and she closed them, briefly, when he turned her head away from his easily, with just one finger. He left the room--left Parker inside, his hands still on her stomach.

Longbaugh waits, smokes his cigarette. He knows Parker will come outside, will come back to him. He knows it.

He's smoking his second cigarette when Parker finally appears. He continues to wait because he knows that he should; he can tell from the set of Parker's shoulders that Parker is going to talk. He has also just remembered that he doesn't even know Parker's real name and that makes him pause, look away for just a moment.

Parker named them both. Longbaugh doesn't remember when exactly--day or night, during his last stint in prison or maybe right after--he just remembers a fight, remembers hearing bone crunch under his knuckles and looking up, seeing a pair of eyes meet his. Afterwards, while blood was drying on his face, he felt those eyes on him again. He turned and met that gaze, saw someone attached to it. That's how it all began.

Parker speaks, the words tumbling out of him in a rush. Longbaugh notices Parker won't meet his eyes, keeps his entire body turned away from his. It's happened before, a few times, and every time it's like someone rubbing glass under his skin. It's wrong, in a way that only something impossible can be. Parker talks about the first time he was up for a real stretch in prison and Longbaugh relaxes, just a little. They've been here before, traded these stories. But Parker keeps talking and that's when Longbaugh remembers that you can know someone, know what their sweat tastes like, know the way they laugh when the exhilaration of a score gone well rushes over them--you can know all that and it's still nothing, it still doesn't add up to shit. You can know someone and if they won't meet your eyes it's like you don't know them at all.

He looks down at the ground and listens to Parker's story anyway. He can be patient, he can wait. It's just a story, like all stories and Longbaugh knows it's a way for Parker to return to what's really bothering him, which is the sallow-skinned girl and her baby, the way they seem to wake something inside Parker. Something Longbaugh doesn't like, simply because he doesn't believe in what happened. Simply because he doesn't share.

But Parker has a surprise. A little one, maybe, but it still hurts and worst of all is that Parker doesn't know it, that he thinks he's just talking, telling stories. "And then I heard him praying. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep...and you know something? It stayed with me. It bothered me. Of all the people I've done it too, that had to be the one I felt. And to this day--I can't go to sleep unless I say that prayer."

Like Longbaugh doesn't know that. Like he hasn't heard those muttered words 'Now I lay me down to sleep/I pray the Lord my soul to keep...' flowing out of Parker's mouth at night, under the lights of whatever city, town, score they're passing through. Like he's never been there, lying right beside him.

It's a fine line to walk--what they do but never acknowledge. It started out easily enough--picking up a girl to share and the way they automatically--instinctively--knew how to communicate what they wanted without speaking. They way they watched each other during, and afterwards. Then one night the girl they picked passed out, slumped to the floor inside her apartment door, her mouth still open to finish her speech about how she didn't usually do this sort of thing. (They all said that. Everyone lies, Longbaugh knows that too.) He kicked her, to silence the slurred sounds of her breathing and looked up to see Parker's teeth gleaming at him in a smile. They went through the apartment, picking up everything of value, their eyes meeting each other in silent, shared understanding. It was a rush, to read each other like that with no one between them. In her kitchen, surrounded by cheap jewelry that could still be pawned, and a tv and stereo that got them $400 combined, they put away the pretense of the girl. Her breathing, wheezing punctuated by gurgles, was the only accompaniment they had and even that was no longer needed.

Parker is the only person Longbaugh has ever closed his eyes to kiss.

He won't stop walking that line now; he won't stop walking it ever. There's no reason to stop. He waits, then asks, "You wanna get out now? You wanna quit? Cause this is never gonna come your way again." Money is easy to mention.

Parker's eyes are wide when he turns to him and the need in them, the belief in them--the belief that giving up on their plan will matter somehow, someway--it makes Longbaugh want to reach out, grind his thumbs against those eyes. He doesn't want them seeing anyone or anything but him.

He doesn't do it. He listens some more, listens while Parker asks him what he'd do if he started believing in God, if he had to answer for all the things he's done. Parker finishes by saying, "What will you say in your defense?"

"What does it matter if we take a child away from its mother?" Fuck this; Longbaugh is done with this bullshit pretense that any of it is about anything other than what is inside that motel room, belly swollen and eyes always ready to fill with tears. A girl pretending and he knows it. "After all the people we've," (and it's we, he's tired of this "you," he's tired of this, it isn't about him or Parker at all, it's about wanting to believe in something that won't ever fucking be, wanting to believe that one person can matter in some way beyond extending life or bringing death) robbed and maimed and murdered, you think it matters?"

"It matters. Believe me, it matters," Parker says and the way he says it-- Longbaugh almost believes him. Maybe even wants to, a little, just because the light in Parker's eyes is almost like that understanding they have, almost like knowing when to move and how to move and just what to do without every saying a word. But Longbaugh still pauses, still doesn't speak, because it's just almost believing. And because the girl is up now, moving across the hotel room floor, her silhouette visible through the window. He knows what he's going to do, to say. "Leave her a note?"

And then Parker's eyes are on him again, full of almost gratitude and confusion and Longbaugh sees that this--all of it--is about something inside Parker, and it makes him feel curiously sad and distant. And it's weakness, like believing, but because it's Parker, Longbaugh closes his eyes, briefly, and speaks again, replies to Parker's stammered "No...no. It's better if we just leave." He wouldn't have left a note either, if he was a believer. They talk a little more, Longbaugh teasing out what Parker knows and then he thinks of his coat, resting on the driver's side mirror of the van, and almost smiles.

"I left my jacket in there," he tells Parker and looks towards the hotel room, then back into eyes he knows so well.

And there's that look again, and there's gratitude in Parker's eyes now. Gratitude and Longbaugh wishes they were alone and that he could lean forward and place his mouth over Parker's slightly parted one, that he could inhale the gratitude, make it his own. But they aren't alone and that look isn't really for him at all. "I'll get it," Parker says and he walks towards the hotel room door.

Longbaugh could have let him go, could have forgotten it all and reworked the plan just for himself. Could have, but never would. Because it's Parker, and he trusts him enough to close his eyes, sometimes. Because that gratitude and that skin and that voice is what he wants and because this will make it all right again. So he pushes Parker to the side as the shotgun blast hits the center of the door, splinters a perfect circle in it.

Parker is against him, pressed into him, and things are falling back into place. When the barrel of Parker's gun pushes into his chin, lifting him up and away, Longbaugh smiles. Smiles because Parker's eyes hold an expression he knows, smiles because Parker is looking just at him. The girl is talking; she's called the police. It doesn't matter at all and they both know it. He says, "You know what I'm gonna tell God when I see him? I'm gonna tell him I was framed."

The gun falls away and Longbaugh backs away from Parker, their gazes still meeting. He moves to the other side of the hotel door, carefully, and looks over, finds Parker's eyes waiting to meet his. Things flow forward again and when Longbaugh ducks down, peeking through the circle in the door at the girl inside, he laughs because everything is right again, everything is as it should be. And this time, nothing and no one will change that again.