Chapter Text
~*~
Cobb Vanth broke 1899 over his knee like kindling, bundled in one fist and ready to burn.
“You know he tried to recruit me for that band of his, the Rough Riders,” he said over the music, into the ear of the scrawny stranger across from him who didn’t look like he knew how to fuck but wouldn’t stop looking at Cobb with sticky little glances that confessed at least some sort of passing interest. Midnight had just crawled past. Cobb already had his feet up on the table.
“Who?”
“Roosevelt. President.”
“Oh.”
The stranger’s attention flitted off into the crowd, the whole of the town packed into the inn right off the plaza. Cobb was a little annoyed that hadn’t piqued interest, nevermind that it was a yarn and a half. He took a slow sip from his glass. “You even know our president’s name?”
“Roosevelt,” the stranger parroted. Cobb rolled his eyes.
“Sure, only ‘cause I just said so. You know there was just a war on?”
The stranger’s look went skeptical. “Look, pal, I’m just here to have a good time.”
Cobb narrowed his own eyes. Sure. Good time. He was on the wrong side of thirty years old, but he could still read the cobwebs on the underside of the phrase. Good time.
“You a punk then?” The stranger choked shallowly on his sip. Cobb smiled to himself. “Thought so.”
“I didn’t say nothin’—”
“Easy, sport. You didn’t say nothin’. I’m just reading what you’re giving me.”
Cobb tipped his glass at the stranger, one eyebrow up. Shall we?
The stranger—the kid, really, couldn’t be older than what, nineteen?—flushed pink and glowered at Cobb as he stood up and tipped his hat messily, too quickly. “Goodnight, sir.”
Holding in a sigh and sipping off the edge of it, Cobb raised his glass in farewell. “Best of luck with the skirts then.”
The stranger left. Cobb settled back in his seat and fixed his eye on the handsome little number playing fiddle at the far corner of the room. He would probably be sleeping alone tonight then, but at least he could let his eyes eat well before heading out.
So, 1899. A new year, the last one of a century.
Maybe it would be a good one. Surrounded by music, laughter, the smell of whiskey and sweat and the Taos dust kicked up by dancing feet, Cobb told himself it would be a good one—so help him God, he’d fucking make it a good one.
~*~
By April, it had only been an okay year.
But Cobb wanted a good year. By the time spring split open in earnest, he’d made a habit of chasing luck with both hands free to grab its hair if it ever crossed his path in any tangible way.
There was a pipe between his teeth one night after Easter trickled away two days past, and a pretty little thing on his knee—he wasn’t going to fuck her, they both knew that, but Cobb had a smile that would make just about anyone happy to share their hash.
A man so subtly handsome he could make a coyote cry was standing across the room looking completely out of his element. Cobb reached out one proverbial hand, fingers wide, and tugged hard at luck’s curly-long locks. Gotchya, fucker.
“Who,” Cobb asked low, just for him and the girl to hear, “is that?”
She turned to illustrate Who with a coquettish roll of her head in the direction Cobb’s eyes were burning. “Looks like he’s new.”
The smoke ring from Cobb’s mouth dissipated almost as soon as it arrived, cracked at one edge and wobbling apart like foal legs. He leaned forward in his seat to peer at the stranger. His arm slid a little more closely around the girl’s waist, companionable. “New-new, or you-only-saw-his-dick-in-the-dark-and-now-his-face-is-new-new?”
Laughter, sharp and glassy from the girl’s long, russet neck. “He looks more from your neck of the woods, chingón.”
Cobb grinned around the pipe stem, sideways and toothy. The stranger—hair like onyx, tamed from his hat with a little flyaway standup lingering at the back of his head; a nose like the proud arc of a river soaring down a cliff side, god damn what a face; those eyes could ruin a life, a large part of him wanted those eyes to fucking ruin his life—the stranger wasn’t looking at him. Cobb could fix that. He grabbed at the girl’s thigh through the flounced, rucked-up layers of her skirts and pressed a growled kiss into the bending grace of her collarbone. “Smart, you’re too fuckin’ smart to be here for keeps.”
“Just smart enough.” The girl pinched Cobb’s face by the chin and both cheeks in one hand, her nails glimmering with laquer on the tips of long fingers. As she stole the kiss from him, all bite, he smiled the whole way through.
Cobb leaned back and put the mouth-end of the pipe between the girl’s red lips. He ran a hand through his hair as she hollowed her cheeks around a dark inhale. The bowl crackled, glowed like the sibilance of a hotheaded secret. “Keep that burning for me, won’t you?”
The girl rolled her eyes. The pipe looked terribly fitting in her mouth. “Be discreet,” she said through her teeth, not believing him as far as she could get him up, and sent Cobb to his feet with a benign swat on the ass with the lace of her fan.
Cobb always figured he was somewhat predetermined to being poured into his predisposition by way of how he could make any purposeful walk of his look like a saunter. He took in the sight of the stranger through one sweet angle of his eyes, starting at the end of the bar just get another good look at him before going over in earnest.
The man had a frown on that face of his, the hint of a spare beard shaved away to clean up nice. The idea worked something wriggly into the space behind Cobb’s breastbone, that someone would clean up nice for anything in this part of town. Must be in for work from a while away. A wandering vaquero, here for the taking.
Once he’d plucked up his muster and gotten closer, close enough that Cobb’s shoulder might accidentally brush against the stranger’s shabby jacket, the pianist had switched his key-tickling to something easy and slow. Cobb leaned forward. The grin he gave the barkeep was ostensible. The smile he angled then at the stranger was calculated; predatory in a quiet way.
The stranger looked him full in the eye like innocence was something one couldn’t lose just by misplacing it. Goddamn. Ruin a life, alright—downright fucking destroy it.
“Drinking that because you like the taste?” Cobb asked with a nod at the man’s glass. It was a clear pour, gin so fresh Cobb could almost feel the sprig of juniper pricking his tongue with the taste of it on the air.
Coded, all of it on this end of the brothel: amber drink for the ones who would only give it, the dark and syrupy shit for the ones who would only take it, and clear liquor for the ones who could stand to both or didn’t quite care either way so long as it wasn’t a woman on the other end of it.
Cobb ordered moonshine, clear like water but oh, so very much more volatile. He raised it with a jaunty tip at the stranger and sipped off the edge—his lips curled, this shit could peel paint, and he drummed up the audacity to wink at the stranger. “I hate the taste,” he offered. “Much prefer the company comes with it.”
There, the parry. A gambit. His arms open to say, Strike if you’d like. I won’t keep you from sinking something sharp and sweet between my ribs, hombre.
The stranger licked his lips with a nervy rush of pink along chapped skin. Cobb liked rather a lot the dark coal-shine of the mustache groomed tidily between that statement of a nose and that sad, pretty mouth.
He stayed quiet for a long while. Cobb raised an eyebrow. “Inglés, o español?”
The stranger raised both eyebrows, brightening gently. “Ah. Los dos, pero no tengo mucha confianza con inglés y lo uso solo para el trabajo. ¿Por favor me podría decir como preguntar por los hombres?”
Cobb blinked. “Sorry, I understood—uh. About half of that. Um.” He squared his feet pursed his mouth for a moment. “I—Yo soy. Un hombre…quién. Disfruto? Disfruta. Disfruta de los demás.”
The way the stranger’s expression shifted through a steady wave of confusion was like watching a herd of cattle collide with a slow-moving train at half-speed. By the end of Cobb’s butchery, he was wincing. Cobb felt the strands of luck’s hair slipping through his sorry fucking fingers with each passing heartbeat.
“Please do not try that again,” the stranger muttered. His accent was soft like river stones, trippy as a brook. Cobb’s pride cracked—probably a good thing to be served a humble pie with eggshells in it every now and again, honestly. He scrubbed at the back of his neck and fixed his eyes to the bartop until his face quit burning.
“Noted. You okay with English then?”
The stranger cleared his throat. “Yes, that is alright,” he said carefully, and Cobb thought maybe continuing with his ruination of a proud and storied language would have been preferable to now feeling as though he was going to vomit his heart out at his feet—the man’s voice was velvet, smooth as well-broken calfskin, and if it had sounded sweet in his mother tongue than it was even sweeter trying to carefully pick its way over the bastard straits of English.
Fuck. Cobb was staring. Be discreet, the girl had said. Yeah, sorry, fucked that well and round. Cobb cleared his throat. “So you’re new. Know the rules here?”
The man’s cheeks pinked. Cobb forced himself to stare at his own hands. “Enough of them,” the man said. He twirled his cup between two hands. Cobb jerked his chin at the untouched gin.
“You know what that means then? To the rest of us?”
Rest of us may have been stretching it. There were only six other men in the room, two of them already engaged surreptitiously in each other and the other four busied with keeping their eyes in their sockets and their tongues in their mouths as they beheld the holy sight of bare thighs and spillover tits.
The stranger cleared his throat. He nipped down a sip from the cup and grimaced at the flavor. Deep in Cobb’s recesses, he clawed luck backward and dug his fingers in to the scalp. Mine.
“I do,” said the stranger, and well—Cobb was not what one would quite call mystical, but he knew when his evening was about to turn on a very pleasant dime.
He leaned a little closer over the bartop. “So,” he said simply, slowly, pitched in his best pillow voice, “do I.”
~*~
The man’s name was Din, Din Djarin. He’d come north by way of Sonora and had a homestead just west of Santa Fe.
He sucked cock like he was born for it and had already spilled once with two of Cobb’s fingers slick and palm-deep in his hole.
The bit about origins, they traded white still at the bar as they pretended to drink and Cobb waxed ambivalent about coming from the empty belly of Nevada—Cobb didn’t crack open the uglies of his past for just about anyone, not especially in a cathouse, but it didn’t feel right to lie to this man. The determination of who was going to be putting what, where between them came after they both bit their bullets, shot their liquor, and proceeded up the steps speaking under their breath while ostensibly following after a pair of girls alighting ahead of them.
The names, they traded from behind the closed door when they scurried to the far end of the hall, latching the room hard behind them, and Din had already rounded on Cobb for a kiss so desperate Cobb was surprised he still had his knees under him when they gasped apart for air.
Din, he breathed against Cobb’s cheek, I am called Din Djarin.
Cobb Vanth, he’d replied, already prying at his belt buckle and mouthing like a starveling at Din’s jaw as he nosed after the smell of him there, professional nuisance. Pleasure’s all mine.
“Yeah,” Cobb breathed, squeezing the underside of Din’s thigh in one wide palm as he twisted his wrist to curl his fingers at an angle that felt right. Din arched against him, his face buckling sore with encouraging bliss. “Whatd’you think, baby, want me to fuck you?”
Din nodded wildly, mussing even more dark curls out of their pomaded order. His cock twitched. Cobb tipped his head and bit his lip. “You like that? Baby. Oh, I’m gonna make you sing, baby.”
And Cobb was a man who kept his word, so he did. Din had a pretty voice when he got going, all soft and gentle, and Cobb tended to like soft and gentle things despite the fact he had little time for either. On his back beneath the stretch of Din’s broad body, picking out the silvery nicks of scars and the black smudge of an abstract tattoo pricked into place over his ribs beneath the roving pathways of his thumbs, Cobb indulged in that softness that swallowed him like a bonfire. Din’s thighs, flexing on either side of Cobb’s waist where they were bracketed, were the perfect place to rest hands hungry for gripping. When Cobb dragged Din down by the shoulder to swallow directly from his mouth the shapes of the quiet pleading in that language Cobb only halfway understood, it tasted like summertime.
He came with stars behind his eyes, traced a whole constellation of them as it went, and then reached between their heaving bellies to ease Din over his second peak with a broken heave of his hips.
Trembling, both of them. Din’s fingers pressed hard into the poor excuse for a mattress on either side of Cobb’s head. A rogue spring dug dull into Cobb’s lower back. Din thunked their foreheads together like an afterthought, still panting.
“What do you mean,” Din rasped, his eyes shut, “by that term, ‘nuisance’?”
Cobb snorted. “A lot to handle. A ruckus. El choque; fracasado.”
A low hum of understanding rumbled in Din’s chest. He lowered himself down carefully, Cobb still inside him as Din’s weight evened out across Cobb’s torso. Cobb shut his eyes and clung to the sensation—however briefly, digging spring be damned.
“You got anything to smoke?” Cobb asked after a long moment. His skin was going tacky, seed drying on the fine hairs of their stomachs. Din grunted and went up on one shoulder to give Cobb the out to slither out and down from the bed. The separation wracked a shiver up the length of Cobb’s back, an emptiness. He caught the barest glance of something tender in the deep dark of Din’s eyes before they both looked away again.
At least the water in the ewer was tepid rather than cold. Cobb pawed with a damp cloth around his bits and under his arms before he dunked the second rag and brought it over to Din. In exchange, Din passed him a sweet-smelling cigarillo and blew a piston of smoke as he reached down between his legs to swipe at the mess well spent.
“How long you here for?” Cobb asked before putting his lips around the roll. Din eased up onto his feet, wincing gently around the stretch in his legs, and staggered to the ewer. He splashed a palmful of water across his cheeks and rolled his shoulders out with a buttery, well-fucked ease. Cobb let his stare perch on the sight with no small amount of pride.
“Two weeks. I am to work a drive, cattle from here to their summer pasture.”
Oh, hell. Luck indeed. Cobb’s grin sharpened and he sucked another mouthful of smoke as he moseyed up to hook his chin over Din’s shoulder. He tasted at the smoke a little, sitting heavy on the spoon of his tongue behind his teeth. When he exhaled, it felt like spinning thread with his mouth.
“When I said professional, earlier,” he murmured, reaching around to place the cigarillo back in Din’s mouth, “I meant the same corner of business. Looks like we’ll be seeing more of each other, partner”
Din frowned as he drew unconsciously on his own drag, held by Cobb’s fingers. He stared at Cobb through the mirror until the pieces slotted into place. “Oh. We are…on the same drive?”
Cobb kissed him noisily on the cheek and left the cigarillo in Din’s mouth. He tapped Din on the ass with a flat hand before returning to the bed to throw himself backward onto the sheets. “Sounds like it!”
The soft mutter of something that may have been a plea for sanity from some saint on high came from ewer before Din’s footsteps rounded close. He loomed pleasantly, the single standing lamp with a red kerchief draped over its shade throwing sharp, ruby shadows across the length of his body. Between two fingers, his arm extended down to Cobb, the cigarillo glowed. He was sort of smirking to himself, almost. Cobb decided to take it as a win.
Smiling and stretching one arm back to prop beneath his head, Cobb reached up and took the last of the offering as fragrant incense. Din shuffled down to cozy against Cobb’s side. Again came the pride. Cobb reached sideways to rest the smoke in a dish on the nightstand and played his fingers lazily into Din’s hair.
“You fuck real pretty, anyone ever tell you that?”
“No. I do not have a habit of indulging.”
Cobb nodded to himself. “Fair’s fair. I’ll keep my mouth shut outside.” He paused, his fingers stilling for the briefest moment in Din’s hair. “Was I your—?”
“No. No. Only the first in some time.”
“Well. Always glad to christen the end of a dry season, pop a cork and all that.”
Din’s shoulders jumped against him. Cobb recognized it belatedly as a chuckle. He shifted against the covers, bullying the covers under his elbow to sit right with his head bunting softly backward.
“You put words together like patchwork,” Din said. There was a smile in his voice, and Cobb lolled his head sideways to see it.
“Didn’t quite savor my time in the schoolhouse, if it ain’t obvious.”
He watched the musculature of Din’s chest spread and bunch as he reached sideways for the last of the cigarillo and indulged in the sight of those lips wrapping around it to suck shallow and tight. The memory of the same around Cobb’s cock not half an hour ago made his low belly jerk with a useless tingle, almost offended at the audacity— At least give me ten minutes, Jesus.
“You wanna get sweet with it?” Cobb asked, his mouth working independently of his mind. Din’s eyes flicked to his. There was a question in the curve of his eyebrows. Cobb licked his lips. “Sleep here. Sprang for the night rather than the hour. Always do before a drive. Get as much mattress in my body-memory before all I have is the ground for a fortnight, yeah?”
Din sniffed another chuckle. He extinguished the smoke with a tp-tp-hsss in the dish, crowded over Cobb with two hands on either side of his face, and kissed him soundly. Cobb could have died here, he decided in the moment, and been perfectly happy to find whatever waited for him there on the far side of it all instead of afraid for once. Just this once.
“I have a very warm body,” Din murmured, which was probably a warning that Cobb wouldn’t want to cling while he slept but instead did a very devilish something to that twitch in his belly and brought it back to life with a valiant, ruby-red lurch.
Cobb kissed back. Din’s mouth was curved ever so slightly by a smile.