#gearseffect

[ohthati]

so, i just spent a whole day finishing this fic.

the fic i had already finished, but i did it on paper, and then i lost the notebook.

and i think it's crap, but at least i had tons of fun writing it.

oh, and i have no idea if the person i wrote this for will actually like it.

i do hope so, gears, love!

[variansbutt]

gearseffect replied to your post: Tonight is the best night cause I heard the sweet...

Is there more to this story? I kinda want to know the rest of it

Ok so he was moping around and we didn't know why. So we asked him if there was something wrong with the computer, he said yes but didn't say what was wrong. So his mum got fed up and said he was probably looking at something he shouldn't be. She checked the browser history and his sister was looking over her shoulder then yelled out "He's looking at gay porn!" and ran into the kitchen where I was. After that I snuck upstairs and heard him screaming and hitting things.

It was music to my ears.

[princessmicrosoft]

psst do some gifs of me Qui-Gon Jinn.

God damn it Qui-Gon Jinn you self centered bastard

[princessmicrosoft]

have you ever played ding dong ditch?

yes omg

[wedugcoal]

See that thing you posted about Boyd and Raylan knowing each other for a long time is proof of what I've always thought "dug coal together" is their secret praise for "we had sex" or "we put or drills in each others poop chute" or "we are really lovers" it's their smartassed secret sassy way of telling the world their lovers without really telling anyone.

That’s what my shipping heart is always telling me, love.

But anyway, let’s just say we’re are not shippers: even if we do not seek a romantic relationship between Boyd and Raylan, we (the fans, the ones watching) have to understand “we dug coal” as something more than just “we had a shitty job together as kids”.

it has a subtext.

now, I’ve read ‘Fire in the Hole’, I do believe you read it as well, and the subtext in Elmore Leonard’s work - in my humble opinion - in the sentence “we dug coal” is about the fact that the mine work in Kentucky is almost like a battlefield - Boyd and Raylan shared the same bond that soldiers share when they fight together, the kind of bond where a man trusts his lie every day into the other. They were about to die at any second, and that’s so powerful: the moment when you’re about to die, the fact that, in that moment, the only thing holding you into life is that other human being, that burning soul beside you, the two of you against an enemy so much bigger, so much more powerful: the mountain in all it’s immortality. That’s what Leonard’s Boyd and Raylan shared.

(Now, let me a Brazilian here for a second: in my favorite romance, The Devil to Pay - Grande Sertão: Veredas - there’s a line, right at the beginning, where the protagonist is about to die, and he says:

And with that, I thought about Diadorim. I could only think about him. A bird sang. I wanted to die thinkin’ ‘bout Diadorim, my brother-in-arms. With my friend Diadorim I held myself, my feelings flyin’ straight to him.

spoiler: he was in love with Diadorim.)

Anyway, when you’re about to die the person beside you becomes your anchor to life, and that’s something powerful in itself.

That was the connection between them in the tale. They didn’t have the same age, they weren’t in high school together, they didn’t share the same woman. That connection, of a battlefield against nature, was enough.

Now, honestly, that’s not the show Justified.

Because Yost takes this and makes it into something else: Raylan and Boyd understand each other, they know each other as no other soul. They have a childhood in common, they both know what was to grown up in the houses the cocaine bought, being the sons of the worst drug dealers in Harlan County. But it’s not just that either.

It’s something else.

Otherwise, it could be Johnny: Johnny Crowder, the guy Raylan played baseball with, the guy who was also in high school with him, nephew of Bo Crowder. Johnny that Raylan doesn’t give two shits about, Johnny that Raylan never cared to visit in the hospital, that Raylan never shared anything with.

It could be Dickie, or any Bennett boy: sons of a crime lady themselves, poor children of the Harlan violence. And no, it wasn’t.

Why does it has to be Boyd? Raylan manages to take a step back from Ava (even though, ‘till this day, he still cares about her); from so many people in Harlan, but not from Boyd.

Now, my shipping heart tells me: it’s love. But the kind of love my shipping heart tells me, it also tells me: it’s sex. And well, that’s… a simple answer, isn’t it.

Now I must warn everyone that this is a shipping blog, and I’ll say something that is not very shipper right now.

Saying “they were lovers” is a way we find to try to answer what the hell “we dug coal” means.

It’s a reasonable answer, too: much, much more reasonable then “those two men share something so deep, so essential that we can’t even put it in words, it escapes all dialogue, all possibility of speech; it’s something so powerful, so important that we don’t even have the words, in english or any other language to talk about; something that will survive twenty years apart and the law of men because that something can’t die; it will survive bullet wounds and handcuffs and betrayals, because, in the end of the day, what they have is bigger than all that.”

"it’s something so unique that not even themselves can understand or truly talk about it, and they’re left stuttering every time anyone question, they can only say ‘we dug coal’, knowing full well it’s a poor explanation for it all."

so, my shipping heart is actually a reasonable heart: by saying they were lovers, i’m trying to explain what could possible be deep enough for tie those two souls. In a way, I’m almost like Carol Johnson: you hear a story like that, and you can’t help but think ‘my god, they must be fucking, otherwise, what’s the point?’. Because if this is not a love story, if this is not about sex and attraction and broken hearts, than, by God, what the hell is this about? How can we call it?

We will end up stuttering just like those two idiots: trying to find words to an affection that we didn’t invent a name for yet.