Work Text:
“Another?” the bartender asked, decidedly nonjudgmental. That’s the way the entire town’s been treating her this week; indulgent, pitying, and Mildred would normally rage against the treatment but for now she really doesn’t give a fuck, especially since it gets her glass filled faster with nicer shit than she’d actually ordered. Talk about customer service. Maybe she should let herself shed a tear or two. Might end up drinking fuckin’ Woodford or something.
She snorts into her cup at the thought; purposefully ignoring the side eye from the fat fuck next to her and instead focusing on reading the fading labels on the bottles behind the counter. Much more interesting.
At least it was until Jason-fuckwad-Dixon pulled up the stool next to her.
“Hey Mildred,” he said and left it at that. He doesn’t even look at her, just waves down the bartender and places his order and sits in silence for a minute, two, three.
Soon enough the quiet gets to her and she can’t fuckin’ believe it, but she’s the one to break it,
“You here to-to sit with me or to stage an intervention, Officer Dixon?” she’s not slurring, not yet, but she needed a second to get her thoughts in line with what she was wanting to say. This is why she didn’t like drinking to excess in public; calling someone a fuckin’ idiot loses its bite when you can’t even get the words out clearly. Dixon doesn’t seem to notice the stumble.
“Nah, didn’t come alone, but we did come here ‘cause you were up here. Just figured we wouldn’t bug you if you didn’t want to be bugged,” He grabs the drinks set in front of him; two beers and an Old-Fashioned Mildred knew was for James. Walking away he called behind his back, “We’ll be over at the pool table if you wanna join us.”
Mildred watches him leave. First surprised that she hadn’t been pulled into any more of a conversation than that, and then just to watch him weave almost gracefully through the crowd of office workers popping in for a happy hour.
She could admit he cut a fine figure. He hadn’t been ugly before, just so much of a shithead that she hadn’t cared a bit about his looks.
Now that he’s gotten that mostly out of his system she could see the appeal. Well, the longer she watched with booze in her system the more she actually could see it; he dropped James’ drink by his elbow as the shorter man set up the pool balls and walked over to where Welby was leaning, getting closer than he needed to hand the kid his drink.
She watched the younger man take the bottle from him with a familiar tilt of his head and a smirk that quickly morphs into an honest smile as Dixon says something close to his ear. Welby’s eyes flicker to where Mildred herself is sitting and she turns her head, caught. Downs most of her glass and stares hard ahead like she hadn’t been caught eyeing them down like some fuckin’ perv.
But as she squints at a faded Sailor Jerry label and the yellow smoke marks on the wall she gets hit with a vision of red hair and pale skin against a darker brunette frame. Jesus-tap-dancing-Christ maybe she should’ve just hired a hooker and gotten laid instead.
Minutes of solitude later there’s someone else at her side, and she’s ready to tell Red that she’s not in the goddamned mood when it turns out it’s James. The words die in her throat as she looks down at him sipping from his glass and eyeing her steadily.
He cocks his head at her with an eyebrow raised, and it’s not pitying or tentative at all. Mildred feels like she can actually hear an honest to god voice in her head asking if she’s going to be sitting here wallowing all night before he walks away.
Prick.
But the bar stool was uncomfortable as fuck. Maybe she could park herself next to the pool table, be on her feet for a bit.
“Glad you could join us,” Red says with a distracted smile as she comes up to the table he’s claimed, right at the moment Dixon’s lining up a shot over the table with his jeans pulling taught against his thighs, the swell of his ass.
Mildred almost chokes on her drink laughing at his face, especially when he notices and flushes as red as his hair, flipping her off. And oh, fine, this is much better than hanging around the bar. Entertaining enough itself to be worth the cost of admission.
So she stays, leans against the tall table and watches the game going on, shoots the shit with all of them at one point or another. She was worried it’d be awkward with James, but he just snorted at her assessment of Dixon’s handling of a pool stick (poor taste, she knows, but it was fucking funny).
Within an hour she can honestly say she’s having a pretty good time. Red sinks a trick shot and high-fives her after she lets out a whoop, Dixon comes back with drink refills more than once. James wrestles control of the jukebox from some idiot playing Green Day and gets it to play some classic Hank.
It’s pretty close to the best damn night she’s had in a long while.
That goes through her mind mid-sip and she has a hard time keeping it down; she came here for a reason, and that reason wasn’t to have a fun with anyone. She’s supposed to be grieving, and guilty, and a fuckin’ mess.
Apparently, her crisis didn’t go unnoticed. A hand comes out to take her glass from her and place it down gently on the table. Jason Dixon is looking at her with genuine concern on his face, Jesus wept.
She can’t deal with him looking at her like that. It takes her back to a conversation and an ill-advised road trip. Which reminds her,
“I am sorry,” she starts. Why the hell not apologize; life was fucking short and she’d tried to get him to kill a man with her, for her, and it was a terrible fucking man but not the one who’d killed her daughter and burnt her into a fucking crisp.
Mildred sucks in a hard breath at that, suddenly nauseous. This wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to drink, yeah, to get fucking drunk but she thought she’d be able to hold it the fuck together at least. After that though she didn’t have much of a plan. She’d get drunk and what? Go calmly home, wake up in the morning, have some coffee and an aspirin and feel better for having done this?
In a desperate attempt to quiet her thoughts she focuses instead on the man sitting next to her and tries again, “I am sorry for what we almost did, Dixon. Jason. But-“
He cuts her off,
“Mildred, we ain’t gotta do this. You got nothin’ to be sorry for, I promise you that,” His eyes track Welby as the younger man laughs at something James says, “God fuckin’ knows I know what it’s like to feel sorry for something,”
“But I was forgiven, apparently. And I’m always gonna forgive others now- now that I know what it got me,” They stand in silence, and Mildred doesn’t have a damn thing to say worth breaking it now, even if her chest tightens at his tone.
He walks away to get back to his game and catches the side of Welby’s leg with the pool stick, holding his stare a second too long before turning to the table.
She didn’t begrudge them their whatever-it-was, happiness or otherwise. She just hated the stab of envy that she couldn’t control when she saw Jason fuckin’ Dixon’s eyes go soft and warm when he watched Red do anything remotely endearing.
And the kid did a lot of endearing-ass shit; hell, he could probably get away with most crimes as long as he turned his Bambi-looking gaze on to the judge. Charges dropped, free to go.
She thinks of the deer suddenly and starts laughing to herself. They’d probably be friends, Red and that little doe. Cute little things with a lack of self-preservation, helping her when she really fucking needed some help.
Okay, maybe one was helping her a bit more reluctantly than the other, but the comparison still stands.
She needs a refill.
At some point though the glass of whiskey in her hands becomes a glass of water, and it’s half-gone before she notices. She’s suddenly, bitterly angry at the switch and has a notion to smash the glass. To pick it up and slam it into the fucking table into a thousand fucking tiny pieces until her fucking hands are full of shards. And there’s the rage she was expecting earlier, right on time.
But the fierceness of the feeling passes, and she just feels tired. Exhausted. So worn out that the thought of having to get up and call a cab and going through the whole process just to get home makes her almost want to cry.
She takes a deep breath to begin the whole fucking process when there’s a tentative hand on her arm,
“Hey, Mildred? You ready to go? Jas- Dixon’s got the truck all ready to head out,”
It’s Red, looking at her kindly, patiently. She doesn’t even know what time it is, but the bar seems pretty cleared out.
“Yeah, I’ll just- just close out my tab, Welby, and I-“
“Already good to go,” the kid cuts her off with a shrug.
Annoyance flashes through her, cutting through the liquor-driven haze a bit; “I didn’t wanna end up being a fuckin’ charity case today, Red,”
He doesn’t seem phased, “Don’t worry, you’re not. It’s not that weird to grab a friend’s tab if they’re havin’ a bad day, you know. C’mon, let’s go before Dixon decides to leave without us,”
Mildred scoffs but follows him out all the same, “He’d never leave you behind, are you kiddin’? I’ve watched soap operas with less lovesickness than the two of you’ve got goin’ on,” And she should probably watch what she says about that in public, but Red just grins back at her. She continues as she tries not to trip, “Me, though? Hell, he’d pick me up on the side of the road just to dump my ass further out than I’d been in the first place just for shits,”
In front of her, Welby pushes the door with a shoulder and faces her as it opens behind him,
“No, he wouldn’t.”
She assumes that love-or a good dicking down- is what makes him say that, so she just raises an eyebrow and walks past him towards the cars, where she can see Dixon sitting in his and waiting.
Red gets in first to sit in the middle, and Dixon’s hand is on his knee before Mildred even gets the door closed. He starts talking as he starts up the car, “Y’all good? Mildred, you wanna head home, or do you wanna come back to my place? I’ve got an extra room you can crash in,”
His face is earnest, and open, and fuckin’ kind. What the fuck?
The kid’s giving her way too much of a smug smile for her to stand, but she gives a small shrug instead of a sharp comment.
Nah, she guesses he wouldn’t leave her behind.
The extra bed is mighty comfy.
*