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hausofmamadas · 2 years

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| This is why the earth eats the dead |

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Pairing: Rafa Caro Quintero x María Elvira

For @narcolini - Narcos fanfic exchange 2022

Word count: 6K

TWs: Canon-typical violence, major character death, descriptions of violence

No, those days were the best because when my swollen eyelids slid back, I saw the sun and the sky and a girl I knew from way-back-when. That girl stood over me with tears in her eyes and a look on her face I’d been chasing my whole life. Betrayed by his bestest good primo, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, and captured in Costa Rica by a one DILF, Guillermo Calderoni, instead of being taken to prison, Rafa Caro Quintero is taken back Mexico to be tortured, dragged by a pickup truck down a back alley road in Sinaloa, and left for dead … on the front porch of the house owned by Miguel’s ex-wife, María. Still fuming after Miguel kicked her to the curb and told her he was staying in Guadalajara to bang barely legal chicks he met at a museum, María’s further devastated by her ex-husband’s descent into assholery when she finds Rafa’s nearly lifeless body. So, the question remains: she can nurse him back to health, but can she fix him?

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✴︎ Cómo me has engañado, mi hermano! Si me ha dicho lo que ibas a hacer, nunca habríamos venido. ✴︎

A conveyor belt of sky rushed above me. Chaotic streaks of what should have been full, puffy white clouds cut across waves of light blue. Or maybe those were just the stars I was seeing after hitting too many potholes headfirst.

But with the sky up there, rushing like that, the earth against my back like steel wool at seventy kilometers an hour, and the rope embedded in the skin of my ankles with the full force of the pickup truck they were tied to, I kept thinking about la Bribri historia de la creación del mundo.** I had heard it from one of the old ladies in the cathedral once. We liked to tell stories while we waited for the fire bombing in the fields to stop y esos shingadamadre chotas to get in their tanks and fuck off again, until next time.

The story went something like this.

The great creator god Sibú was having a hard time. He needed a place to put his creations but could find nothing suitable to make it with. You’d think since he created life, he could make a place for it too, but it seems even gods have their limits. So, when a bat, flying by, happened to shit soil from which all kinds of marvelous plants grew, naturally Sibú had to know his secret. (Creation myths, right? Fucking trippy.) The bat, who Sibú called tío even though they weren’t related (which never made any sense to me), told him he’d been feeding on the blood of Iriria, the newborn Earth. And wasn’t this great news for Sibú because Iriria happened to be the child of his sister, Tapir. Except, Sibú no era su tío and she wasn’t his niece (which never made sense to me either but maybe it was different for gods that way.) Anyway, Sibú hatched an elaborate plan. To lure Tapir and Iriria from where they’d been staying in the underworld, he invited them to a grand festival and asked them to put on a show, dancing the Sorbón dance for the attending lower gods, demons, and spirits. So, they did. They went and they danced. But something happened when Tapir and Iriria danced and it changed everything. The young girl tripped and fell, and all according to Sibú’s plan, in the furor and excitement of the Sorbón, the demons and spirits couldn’t see her. So they kept on dancing. Stomping on poor, helpless Iriria. Over. And over. And over. Until all that was left of her was trampled earth, from which Sibú made, well, the Earth. Seeing her daughter’s demolished remains, Tapir seethed with rage: How, my brother, you have betrayed me! If you had told me what you were going to do, we would never have come. So it’s said today, for the sacrifice of her daughter, tapirs are sacred animals not to be hunted for food or sport. And as atonement for Sibú’s betrayal and the wounds inflicted on her by his creations, all life, this is why we bury the dead. Return them to Earth for her to consume.**

𐮛

I thought about Sibú a lot when I worked in the greenhouse. When I finally had it, mi sinsemilla, primo declared me a genius. María joked that I was a regular mad scientist. But all I could think about was Sibú. About how his curiosity yielded the universe’s great masterpieces at the expense of those around him.

But thinking about it just now, sky rushing up above and the steel-wool-earth against my back, seventy kilometers an hour, I couldn’t stop laughing. It was fucking hilarious.

Because I realized it wasn’t really me who was Sibú, after all.

𐮛

Those early days were the best. Well, maybe not the first few. Definitely not the first one, when I woke up in a cold sweat, hands and ankles tied together, blood-soaked shirt, now dried, fusing me to wood slats of her front porch. Maybe I’d been her front porch all along. Why else would they leave me here? I couldn’t remember them, the “they” that left me. I couldn’t remember me. The pain in my shoulder was too much. I couldn’t remember why.

No, those days were the best because when my swollen eyelids slid back, I saw the sun and the sky and a girl I knew from way-back-when. We raced dirt bikes in the town square. She let me sleep on her couch when I’d been out too long in the field, then the greenhouse. I used to call her the brains of the operation - ‘No se la llevaron toda, compa.' - because she saved mi sinsemilla, then me. That girl stood over me with tears in her eyes and a look on her face I’d been chasing my whole life. Looking at me like I always wished she would. Only this time, I didn’t have to feel guilty.

She shouted for help, wild, brown hair whipping in the wind while she demanded answers from the nothing and nobody that left me there. In all my dreams before, she wasn’t so sorry for me. But who was I anyway? No matter. I didn’t need to remember to know who she was.

𐮛

I thought one of my fractured ribs might’ve punctured a lung because it took days for me to stop coughing up blood. Weeks to stop screaming out in the night. For Sofia. Sometimes Miguel. Mostly María. Because I knew who she was and she looked at me like that and I didn’t have to feel guilty. Except, it took a few more weeks to remember why.

It came together in the kitchen one morning, when she was making breakfast. Easy as always, the smell of cafe con leche, bacon, tortilla chips, soon-to-be migas sizzling in the pan. She sang softly con Los Zafiros. ‘El gringo, Rafa. Adónde se lo llevaron?’

The eggs she cracked against the edge of the bowl buckled my shoulder. Sofia screamed in the steam of the kettle going off. Then that face from the edges of the darkness behind my eyelids - eso hijo de la shingada chota con su bigote negro and those beady little eyes.

'Sabes que me gusta mucha acerca del hombro, Rafa? Cuánto duele cuando lo sacas de su articulación. Duele igual. Cada vez. El dolor te rompe el alma mucho antes de que se rompan los huesos.'

El dolor te rompe el alma, no mames. Mi alma ya se rompió when the first gunshot exploded the glass and I knew what mi primo did to me. If that fat bastard hadn’t been so sweaty when I spat in his face, it might’ve made a difference. Maybe not, since he never missed a beat and the cracking never stopped. The bones of my shoulder in and out of its socket, cartilage stripping like threads of a screw.

My head swam, my mouth tasted like iron, my throat was numb, I felt cold. Was this finally my time? Qué lástima sería. I just got her, just got here. Were there tiny needles swimming in my bloodstream? Cortisol. Adrenaline. Like high, but none of the flavor, none of the fun. She caught me just before my face smacked the table.

I came to with my head in her lap, mumbling, “Lo huevo– vas a quemar los huevos.”

“Qué?”

“Huevos. Pa’ las migas.”

She shook her head, “Ay, Rafa. Qué voy a hacer contigo?” and smiled my favorite smile.

My lips felt like rubber but I beamed back up at her anyway. “Ocuperás de mí?”

It took a few weeks for her to stop sobbing when she sat by my bed and watched me sleep. I didn’t know who I was, so she knew it was bad. Without a clue how, I still wanted to comfort her. I guess I did in a way, since she only ever stopped when she got up to place her finger under my nose.

If I’d been awake and remembered who I was, I would’ve told her I deserved it por todo lo que hice. Even if he deserved worse but wouldn’t get it. That old house, piles of leaves in the empty swimming pool. 881 Lope de Vega. I heard from someone later on that they’d drilled into his hands at the end, demanding to know the nothing and nobody he knew.

So, it seemed only fair they’d dragged me down some backwoods dirt road. Seventy kilometers an hour never felt so fast and took so long. I hadn’t met the man, but they said he’d had a family. My whole foolish life, I wondered what it was like to be missed by so many that much. Of course, that wasn’t why I did it. I did it to remind him I was flesh-and-blood real, standing right there. And yet when it was all over, cold, calculating, with eyes as old as time, mi primo still didn’t see me.

I probably would’ve told her too that I was far from the boy she raced dirt bikes with. But that other boy we knew from way back when? The thoughtful one with eyes as old as time, that boy was lost altogether.

And if I’d been awake and remembered who I was, I would’ve wept right along with her because that’s how much I missed him.

𐮛

When I could finally walk without getting dizzy, she took my hand and led me out into the backyard, my favorite smile blooming with the flowers on her red dress.

“Where are we going?”

“Tranquilita, mi Rafa. Vas a ver.”

Mi Rafa. I couldn’t remember when she started calling me that. But to belong in such a way? It hurt how much I never knew.

We continued past the yard, onto a dirt trail that led downhill until we came to the edge of a great, big, empty field. She glowed when she told me it was all mine.

“What’s this?”

“Es tuyo para hacerlo como que tu quieras.”

“No me chingues pues. Toda esta madre?”

She nodded, soft lips in a soft smile. And I couldn’t help but pick her up and swing her around, even as my shoulder screamed. She screamed too, like we were kids.

I set her back on the ground with a wince. “Ya tengo un plan.” When I put my arms down, the right one bent awkwardly to ease the throbbing in my shoulder. She took it, splinting my elbow against hers between us, and put her other arm around my waist. I grumbled but she shot me a familiar look that assassinated any and all will to resist.

“Leave it to you to overdo it after being out here no more than five minutes.”

I laughed. “You know me better than almost anyone. When have I ever made things easy for myself.”

“Sí, sí, Rafael Caro Quintero. A man of great passion, no sense, and odd enthusiasms. Like swinging grown women around with a shoulder no sturdier than ground beef.”

“Aahh, no me digas. You love it.”

“Entonces, cuál es tu plan?”

“Pues por supuesto, I’ll build a greenhouse. And when that’s done, I’ll start with sinsemilla.”

She smiled wryly, “Claaaro qué si. Because it hasn’t caused you enough trouble.”

“And then, I was thinking we could sell it.” She cocked an eyebrow up and pursed her lips, a look that said she thought I’d lost it. Again. “But instead of competing with the other plazas, we unite them, create una grande federación, controlando todo el mercado de mota.”

Her face relaxed and she chuckled darkly, elbowing me in the ribs.

“Ay, ya basta. I’m still fragile.”

“If that really is your plan, pues voy a romper tu otro hombro, hombre.”

I looked out at the black hills on the horizon, seeing María’s face in place of eso pendejo Calderoni. Savage brown eyes, enraged, beads of sweat dotting her perfect forehead.

“Si ese chota hubiera sido tan hermosa como tu?” I looked down at her and winked. “El dolor? No me valía madre. I wouldn’t felt a thing.”

She elbowed me again. “Ay, pinshe bruja, no mames.” No loyalty left to dam the tide, it was hard not to get carried away ‘cause I adored her more than the world.

“No mames tu, cabrón. So, c’mon. Let’s hear it. The real plan.”

“Sí, sí, bien.” With my arm still propped against hers, we started walking slowly along the edge of the field. “Esos manos,” I wagged my hands, “fueron hechas para cultivar sinsemilla, pues sí? Pero quien sabe pues? I can grow other things, coffee beans, cacao. Algo así.”

Maria looked down at the ground and shook her head. “Appropriately indulgent.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Chocolate, coffee, little addictions. Una sombra de las drogas, sí but always indulgent.”

“Pues sí, pues. Qué dijiste de mi? A man of odd enthusiasms.”

She leaned her head into the crook of my neck and squeezed me tight. I didn’t have to feel guilty. Sometimes I did anyway. Instincts of self-preservation were hard-earned-hard-lost in my line of work.

𐮛

She stopped crying at my bedside while I slept but sometimes, she still cried in the middle of the night. A vision in a white caftan, sleeveless shirt, linen pants. Chain-smoking La Llorona, haunting the steps of her own front porch. She usually sat in the spot where they left me that first day. We tried so hard to get the bloodstains off the wood but they’d have to be sanded and revarnished, which I promised I’d do. Except I hadn’t yet because I was scared when I did, I’d lose me for good.

My room was at the front of the house, so sometimes I’d turn over in bed, close my eyes, and listen while she swallowed the sadness back so hard, she could barely breathe. That conveyor belt of blue sky would pop in my head with her sobs like a soundtrack. The more nights we played out this routine, the more I knew we— she couldn’t go on like this. Too great a toll, pretending she wasn’t living with a dead man, hiding me from him and the whole world. None of it was any of mine, anyway.

So, it was the weirdest thing. When I’d finally decided to leave, that’s when it happened.

I went out and sat with her, which I never did. But it this time it was raining and she couldn’t catch her breath and I got scared. You could call it inconsolable but that’s too small. She didn’t stir when the screen door slammed or rush to hide the evidence. No doubt she knew the angry red splotches on her cheeks gave everything away.

I didn’t know what to do. But then I remembered what someone told me once: how comfort is like a kiss. No rulebook, but instinct. So, I did what I felt. I sat on the steps next to her, hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee like we were two sides of the same seam because it seemed the thing to do. Splinting her to me to ease the pain like she did with mine.

We sat there like that. For a time.

I took a joint from my pocket and held out my hand. “Encendador, amor.”

Her hands were so cold, I nearly jumped when she passed it to me. She didn’t seem to notice as we sewed back together again, this time with her head on my shoulder. I lit up and tried to blink away the dark spot in my vision left by the hot embers at the end of the joint. Because it made me think of the metal rods they’d used. Hands tied up and hanging. Glowing red tips pressed to my sides.

I inhaled, then breathed her name out with smoke, “María.”

She sniffled, “Sí.”

Looking down next to me, I studied the bloodstains that dotted the wood, tracing them with my finger. “I’ll take care of these in the morning,” I said, dusting them. “Then I think I’ll go.”

In the crook of my neck, I felt her stiffen. “So that's how you’d repay me, then. Just leave.”

“I thought you’d be relieved.”

We sat there like that. Some more.

Until she jerked her head off my shoulder and looked at me, not bothering to wipe the new tears rimming her eyes. Her caftan slid off her shoulder. I pulled it back up and watched goosebumps spread across her collarbone, up her neck. On my hand, up my wrist, I got them too like they were contagious.

“Querida.” Confused, I swiped a tear from her cheek and held my thumb up, “No se trata de eso, o qué?”

She cocked her jaw to to one side, then looked away and scoffed. I loved the way she looked when she did that and hated when she did it to me.

“A día de hoy, estás una de las chingas personas más listos que he conocido en toda vida, mi Rafa. But sometimes.” She turned to look at me through half-lidded eyes, exhausted all of a sudden, “Sometimes you still see the world through the eyes of a boy I knew from way back when.”

Before I could ask what she meant or if she’d been reading my mind, her lips were on mine. And every nerve from my scalp to the heels of my feet detonated. My whole life flashed before my eyes. What I wanted most in the world, that I never had, because none of it was any of mine, anyway. That’s what she was supposed to be until I ended up in an early grave, right? Oh, right. Funny, since I actually had died. In a way.

Her cold hand wrapped around the back of my neck, lips and tongues ebbing, flowing against each other. My brain like it was knocking against my skull, mind screaming at me to stop and still I found my hand sliding around her waist. Perilous, rigid edge of her teeth on my lower lip made me hitch my breath, to prepare me for— She bit down hard. Hard enough to snap gravity and I dug the pads of my fingers into the small of her back to ground myself without it. Then I caught her lip in my teeth and nipped back. Two sides of the same seam. So, it must’ve been insanity itself that brought my hand to that satisfying spot where her neck met her jawline. And ripped it. Like an idiot.

And all I could choke out was, “Not … this … way.”

She was alert suddenly, startled by what I’d said. Or maybe the way I said it. Maybe trying to piece out the truth from the lie. Since I didn’t mean it really. Except I really did. With all of me. I wondered if she could see my mind vibrating, violently searching for an explanation, and that’s why she waited. Waiting while I malfunctioned.

“I can’t— the— why, how— please don’t— don’t make me what you use to get back at him.”

Her lips pursed and she furrowed her brow. Looking at the little lines that creased her forehead and between her eyebrows, I wanted to take it all back, grab her, crush her into me. Probably before I was insane, I would’ve. But sanity got burnt up at seventy kilometers an hour and all that was left was the echo not like this, not like this, not like this over and over.

There was a look of awe on her face. And it gave me the strangest, most painful feeling. Like I wished a hole would rip open in the Earth, so we could jump in and entomb ourselves there for forever. Scar-tissue-thoughts I called those ‘cause they reminded me how my mind would probably never be like it was before. I tried not to get lost in that one like I did sometimes.

She cupped my face with one hand, and pulled my arm around her waist with the other, placing it in the same spot as before. Except for her hands, she felt warm against my chest in a way that made my stomach drop. The clouds parted a little, so I saw her eyes in the light of the moon. They looked lit with it, from the inside.

“What makes you think this is about him at all?” Then she kissed me again, and again.

We both knew it was a lie. But on nights like those and many others, nights when we got tangled like that, nights when we were both sides of the same seam, we pretended it wasn’t.

I had to stop pretending when she started taking his calls again.

𐮛

I don’t know how long it was. It must’ve been months, a year, maybe more. Long enough for me to forget I was dead. Time didn’t pass for me how it did before. No, that’s right. It must’ve been years because it was sometime around the election. I only knew he got into trouble with that old bat in Matamoros and in trouble with the politics. Again. Only this time he had no one else to feed the machine when it was done and they got what they needed. Yeah. That was it. Because he came back to Badiraguato, back home to lay low.

That was when he started showing up everywhere. He even came by the house one time.

There was something satisfying about the squeaking sound the hinges made when the backyard gate door swung open and closed. I liked to pull extra hard just to hear it and that day was no different. Nothing different about the way I skipped up the steps to the patio either. Or how I wiped my boots on the rug outside before I stepped in the house.

Before I could smell the food, I heard them in the kitchen, María chiding Abril.

“No, no, no, no. Nada de dulces antes de cenar.”

“Pero tengo haaaambre.”

“Después de tu tarea. Ándale. Dile a tu hermano también.”

I walked through the dining room to the kitchen and set a pile of herbs on the counter.

She smiled slyly at me, “Nunca paran de tragar.” Her face lit up when she saw the herbs. “Ah, fresh from the greenhouse. Didn’t think you’d have them this time.”

I caught her arm as she reached for them, and pulled her in for a kiss. She deepened it, sliding her hands from my forearms to my shoulders. She always held on longer than I expected. I’d never gotten used to it.

She pulled back and smiled. “After I add these, dinner’ll be ready.”

“Ah, for you, amor. I’ll wait forever.”

Her hands still around my neck, she threw her head back and rocked me forward a little. “If it weren’t for that diabolical smile of yours, that would be the cheesiest line I’ve ever heard.”

“No te preocupes, mija.” I winked. “It’s the cheesiest I’ve ever used.”

She fiddled with the buttons at the top of my shirt, “Given what I know of your history, chulo,” then let go and turned to the stove, “that’s saying something.”

I grinned as I walked away, “What history?”

I headed to my bedroom to find her father looking out the window. He tried not to look embarrassed when I knocked on the open door.

“Lo siento, Rafa. I was just—” When he couldn’t find a proper excuse, he just sighed and raked his hand over is face, motioning out the window.

That’s when I saw his blue Buick idle up the driveway and park at the big metal gate. He didn’t get out right away. Just sort of sat there. So, her father and I just watched him, watching.

“Papá, ya quieres tu café? Papá!”

Neither of us answered her.

“Qué pasa?” Her determined footsteps got louder and louder, until she breezed into the room.

I didn’t bother trying to lie but he attempted a too-rushed, “Nada. No pasa nada.”

The joy of intrigue wiped from María’s face and now she just looked wary. “Qué estás mirando, entonces?”

Incredible how little I felt, holding back that curtain, staring at the outline of the man responsible for my death, while he sat in the driver’s seat of mi primo’s blue car. For a split second and all at once, I hated him because I missed him. It hurt how much I missed him. Then I hated me for missing him. And then it emptied to nothing. The oddest thing. Pretty fucking dumb too. I should’ve been afraid at least, considering what would happen if he or anyone knew I was alive. Back in that room with the metal prods, pain, shoulder popping, in-and-out, in-and-out, pain, dry mouth, wet concrete tongue dragging across the roof of it, pain and too much more.

I didn’t know how I felt, so I didn’t know how I wanted her to respond because it never mattered so much what I wanted. But there was no denying my heart seized up in my chest, the arteries all throttled, when I saw how hard her jaw clenched and watched her rage nearly warp the air around her. I supposed she’d have to have been hit in the head as many times as me, to feel the nothing I did.

The three of us stood motionless for a moment, until she sighed, turned around to look at the bedroom doorway, then back again to the window, before making a break for the front door. As she dashed down the still-stained front steps and marched across the courtyard to meet him at the gate, it hit me. He’d just got there. Hundreds of feet from us and not even out of the car yet, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away. And even though I stood right there, next to her, she never once looked at me. Before walking out the door.

That was the end of pretending.

𐮛

I was putting up the fence around the greenhouse, hammering posts on the north side of the field, when she brought out iced tea and empañadas. It hadn’t happened in a long time but I kept seeing them today. Flashes of dirt road in the wood grain of the posts, rushing, dragging beneath me. I had to stop now-and-again to wipe them from my eyes. She told me I looked tired. When she could tell I was tired, she liked to give me things to dream about. Maybe that’s why she asked.

“Quieres venganza?”

I stopped hammering and stood up straight.

“Qué?”

“Supongo— lo que quieres decir es si piensas en la venganza?”

I swung the mallet over to rest on my good shoulder and looked out onto the horizon. Something about these sunsets at home made me want to hold her. And the wanting but not, made me want too much at once.

“Claro que no, querida. I'm just happy I’m not dead.”

She looked at me quizzically as she walked over. She set the cup and plate on the empty wood barrel next to me and picked a piece of hay from my hair.

What was she asking? And why? And why now? Too many tangled up questions and the words came tumbling out. No amount of grabbing empty air would shut them back up into the leaky box, my mind, where they belonged.

“Why? Do you?” Because I had stopped pretending but I didn’t know if I was I ready for her to. “Is that what this is?”

She leaned her head against one of the posts. Looking out into the red-orange sky, no hesitation, crisp like glass, “A veces.”

I suppose I knew. It never made sense for her to love me all of a sudden and for no good reason except I just showed up one day and needed her.

“But not usually.”

Windswept hair and brown eyes lit red by the horizon, downright dangerous was how she looked. The sky looked like hell and she looked at it like it was hers. María at her most dangerous gave El Jefe de Jefes a run for his money. I always figured that’s why he sent her away. And yet, just like me, she felt so much more for him than he deserved. How could she not, padre de sus hijos. And how could I expect her to let go when I couldn’t. Still, being reduced to a weapon was a familiar disappointment. It meant, like him, she couldn’t see me just then.

I grabbed an empañada and shoved it in my mouth, too fast, so she couldn’t see how hard my jaw was clenched. It burned my tongue and nearly cooked the back of my throat as I swallowed. Maybe this was my sign to run, take advantage of being dead, leave the boy and the girl I knew from way-back-when for good.

My throat, still with that numb, burnt feeling made my voice thick, so I didn’t sound so wounded. “Given the look on your face, I see you have.”

When she closed her eyes, I realized she was crying. I always thought it was weird how that happened sometimes when she was angry.

“He’s their father. But with how they left you, Rafa–” She pulled in a deep, shaky breath like preparing for confession, “I— I don’t know where to put it. All this rage.” Her hands balled into fists and she turned to look at me. “Did you know, when I can’t sleep, sometimes I count the ways he’s hurt us like counting sheep.”

Those few solitary tears sliding down her cheeks, catching at her chin, dripping off the edge of her jaw onto the collar of her shirt, I felt the urge to bottle them up and take them with me everywhere. Scar-tissue-thoughts. I didn’t know what to say, so I just stood there, waiting to follow her lead. Just as I had in all things.

“And that’s when I think, yes. He was their father. But now? Ya no más que una puta infección, un enfermedad de la verga, polluting everything he touches.”

“Do you feel polluted?”

“Qué?” She gave me that look again, eyebrow cocked, like I was nuts.

I dropped the mallet, and walked over. Arms crossed, I rested them on the finished part of the fence and propped my chin up to look at her.

“It’s just what I said. ‘Cause well,” I tapped my temple with my finger, “I have some screws loose and– how did you put it? Ground beef for a shoulder?”

She cracked a small smile. Success.

“So, we both know I’m polluted. Owe that to myself more than anyone, most likely. But not all of it, true. So, do you feel he’s polluted you?” Then I jutted my chin up toward the house, “Them?”

She was quiet for a long time, long enough for the sun to slide behind the hilltops, casting her in new shades of purple. I was trying hard not to disappear like I did sometimes. She fixed her eyes on me just in time, swiping her cheeks quickly. “Ah, mi Rafa. It’s just what I said. Everything he touches.”

I asked it with no anger, no jealousy. That wasn’t what this was about. “So why go, then?”

We’d never talked about it but she knew what I meant. She never lied to me, so wasn’t some big secret. She didn’t even try to hide the invitation. To some political three-ringed circus to celebrate the election. He was sending a private jet for her and everything. It was a big deal.

She considered the question for a long time, before whispering, “I have to know for sure.”

“Know what?”

“That I’m right to believe he can’t change.” She stepped away from the post and walked down the length of the fence, grazing her hand along it until it came to rest on my arm. Then she leaned in and kissed me. It didn’t feel like goodbye just yet. But we were getting there.

Then we stayed like that for a little while, forehead to forehead, eyes closed. In my head, I got the sensation like I was falling.

“And what more is there to lose when the damage is done, when we’re polluted already.”

I watched her disappear up the hill heading back to the house. I should’ve said it even if I knew it wouldn’t have made a difference. Unless you were dead, he’d find something to take. Because he only saw the world in terms of “more.” He polluted you with the prospect of “more.” It’s what made him so brilliant. And why he was all alone.

I grabbed the mallet to get to work again. But I was seeing the road in the grain of the wood still. It was coming at me, faster this time. Not flashes. I was there again. It had been a while but actually, I’d been back a few times since it happened.

In the beginning, I couldn’t stop living there. That’s why she started climbing into bed with me. To remind me I wasn’t there because I couldn’t be because no one could be in two places at once. She’d put her arm around me and I’d lean against her, unable to move except to jolt every time a rock kicked up and seared the back of my neck, gouged another welt in my shoulder blade, cracked against one of my elbows. My hands were always the worst, no circulation, bound numb and twisted in the ropes, mangled by the friction of the gravel they slid over. Before I blacked out, I was curious every time. How’d I get here? The answer in his voice, always so calm, and filled with love lost and sadness. Which made sense since he knew I was a lost cause.

Ya tienes más de que lo necesitas. Ya dejar de soñar, Rafael.

And maybe that was the whole problem.

𐮛

After that, I didn’t wait too much longer, a few weeks maybe. Then one morning, I got up at dawn and crept around the house, collecting my things. If I waited to say goodbye, I'd never leave. Because she wouldn’t want me to and it still wouldn’t be enough. She gave me plenty to dream about and I loved her for it and I loved her.

But I was awake now.

I was holding too much stuff, so I swung the door open too hard. Caught just before it slammed, and I sighed, chest full with disappointment and relief. I guided it gently to a close, then strode across the porch to the steps where I stopped short to look down at the clean, newly varnished planks where my blood used to be. It happened just like I thought. I lost me. I was gone. For some reason I thought of the story again, about how the world was made.**

On that back alley dirt road, laughing into the sky like I wasn’t dying, I’d finally worked out that I wasn’t Sibú, but I never decided who I was instead.

Was I the chorus of trampling demons and spirits? Was I Tapir? Or the trodden Earth Iriria? Or maybe, since I’d sort of died, I was thousands now buried, recompense, fodder in the machine of their vengeance. Or maybe I was nothing at all.

My heel hit the first step. I guess I had time now and the whole world to figure it out.

𐮛

And that's a wrrrrap! Sorry for all the Spanish. I was going to make a glossary but I already wrote the thing and it's 6,000 words give or take, so just gonna have to give it a good ole Goog. Thanks for reading.

**See here if you're interested in learning more about mesoamerican myths and legends or about the bribri tribe specifically, this is where I found the story.

#fuck these tags #too tired #rafa caro quintero #maria elvira #narcos mexico fanfic #guaranteed there are typos #some grammatical weirdness in this #as my friend likes to say #couldn't be arsed #cba #see how cool and british i am #even though i couldn't be further from british #it's fine

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nelllraiser · 3 years

Text

hell’s true north | adam & nell

TIMING: current. LOCATION: hellscape number ??. PARTIES: @walker-journal & @nelllraiser. SUMMARY: adam follows his compass home. CONTAINS: sibling death (brief references to the bea plot), mass poisoning (from inhospitable domain), parental death mentions.

Vines with the texture of withered leather fingers writhed under Adam’s feet as he stumbled out of a brackish puddle of ichor. Disaster response boots that’d been designed to weather fire, acid, and radiation had eventually yielded before the onslaught of otherworldly environs. Now the ragged soles barely clung to his feet, wrapped tight with bloody strips of bloody demon hide. The most cutting edge kevlar, environment-resistant tactical gear, breathing apparatuses, and deadly military firearms had been gradually ravaged into uselessness by universes full of chemicals and alternative laws of physics that Earthly science had never imagined. As the tactics, preparation, and martial science Adam had once relied on was stripped away in the nonstop battles with demonic flora and fauna, the title of Hunter had become brutally literal.

Adam spelunked through caverns that formed from the innards of sleeping elder things, scaled cliff sides made of solidified light and shadow, jumped across archipelagos of bone islands floating in stormy skies, climbed up trees the size of skyscrapers whose fruits were embryonic sacks in which monsters gestated, hiked across the savannahs with rolling plains of scalpel-sharp obsidian grass, and tightroped across worlds that were just spider webs of tentacles stretched across abyssal gyres.

Adam was now a ragged figure where a dauntless soldier had once been, the shreds of his tactical uniform stitched together with leather and pieces of chitin. Once the olympics-ready peak of health, the footballer’s veins were stained with dark lines across his skin and he stumbled across the landscape of grasping roots and tide pools of black blood. His breathing was shallow treks through world after world had wracked the Hunter’s body with alien toxins that even the mutant’s regeneration was failing to fight off. Adam’s vision was blurred with the edges and everything muscle in his battered body begged to just lay down in darkness.

But the compass in Adam’s hand pointed the way across the hellscape of fire, floating islands of tentacled flesh, and geometric monoliths to old gods that's already sunk into dreaming torpor long before humankind had discovered fire. Adam fought back agony and followed the compass needles across the poisoned land.

Everything had blurred together by now. Nell couldn’t even clearly remember how she’d gotten to this realm, just that she’d fallen through far too many holes in the ground, off cliff sides, or out of sky-hanging oceans to even begin to remember what world this was. The red skies she’d originally arrived under were long gone, barely a memory after all the worlds that had followed, and all the attacks she'd scrambled to come out of in one piece. Though perhaps calling herself one piece was being generous when she’d resorted to packing the missing chunks of her flesh with whatever she could find that didn’t instantly sting and burn at her open wounds. She didn’t know how long it had been since she’d slept, time still immeasurable in places like these— just that she hadn’t done it since the baykok’s attack. The lack of sleep meant she hadn’t been able to replenish a single shining grain of her magic after she’d been quite literally drained and fed from, her body having nothing but sheer determination to keep her wavering feet from falling out beneath her.

Something was the very definition of fundamentally wrong with this world in terms of survivability. Nell could feel it in the way each breath felt sharper than the last, and the ugly coughs that had her spitting up black specks on the palms of her hands. None of the places she’d seen could have been described as friendly, but this one felt like it was digging her foot deeper into the grave with every second she stayed. She needed to find a way out if she wanted to make it another hour. Nell was far past the point of finding a way back to White Crest, ready to settle for a hellscape that wasn’t killing the witch with every inhale of her lungs, and go from there if she could manage to last that long. How long had she lasted already? How much longer could she last? She’d always been a fighter, refusing to go down without taking at least a part of her attacker with her. But how could she carve out a piece of a world? How was she meant to rage against an entire realm? Maybe sometimes there was simply nothing to fight against, the hand of Fate snuffing out her life whether she liked it or not.

And yet she kept walking, limping along as the injury on her leg oozed with some otherworldly infection that promised to kill her if this air didn’t. There was no direction, no plan, just the foolish hope that she’d stumble into a place where she could properly breathe. She walked until she could barely make out a figure on the horizon, squinting her eyes against the bright green and dingy brown of this place while she wondered if this would be the final creature to kill her. But the figure grew closer, and despite her best judgement an uncontrollable wave of hope flooded her chest. “Adam?” she dared to utter, even though she knew it was far too good to be true. Nell and the hellscape had done this before in the form of a tikbalang sending her astray with the perfect illusion of her hunter. “We’re doing this again?” she asked the air in a tone that was resigned to the disappointment of finding another falsehood, the high instantly giving way to a low. “What is it? Another tikbalang?” But this Adam was different. He looked sickly, and past the point of battered— like he’d already knocked on death’s door only for death to tell him to come back in ten or so minutes. They’d call him when they were ready. Why would an illusion-caster show her this?

Hallucinations had become ever more common as toxic environs and constant otherworldly stimuli wore down Adam’s nervous system.

Sometimes it was dad, gently reminding him of past lessons as Adam fought his way through nightmarish creatures and tried to find his way through landscapes only possible in other realities. Other times it was James or Terry, come to chat idly about football and girls as Adam trekked across wastelands whose sloping yet flat contours didn’t obey the rules of time and space. Dave gruffly reminded him about knots and the perils of marine warfare as Adam journeyed through rivers that flowed up into the sky and seas of sentint poison. Regan gave pointers on splinting a broken arm with a demon’s bones all while primly reminding him she wasn’t that kind of doctor. Orion nervously recounted facts about obscure demon types as Adam ducked claws and spines while trying to find a weak point. Ariana punched Adam in the arm and reminded him to buck up and put on a tough grin when everything was just pain. Athena gave advice on slowing the poison’s spread through his body with her mixture of tenderness and steel. Kaden brusquely correctly Adam on his stances as the younger Hunter’s limbs trembled with neurological damage, before reminding him to stay alive. Mina kept him vigilant, pointing out dangerous movements and sounds even when every fiber of Adam’s body wanted to sink into oblivion. Morgan spoke gently to him when the horror became too much, her hand on his shaking shoulders when the mental strain of glimpsing elder things sent Adam into seizuring convulsions. Dani reminded him of duty and their ancestral oaths with a concerned smile when ancient deceivers whispered in Adam’s brain, offering easy miracles in his moments of weakness. Luce yelled at him to get the fuck back up and fight when Adam could barely stand and death’s release drew close. Beatrice demanded that Adam remember who he’d come her for, when poisoned dreams threatened to swallow reality entirely.

So this was not the first time Adam’d met Nell and had to hold back tears when stabbing yet another shapeshifter to death or felt crushing emptiness when it turned out he’d only embraced only empty air.

Adam looked down at the compass needle, pointing unerringly forward.

“Hey Nell,” Adam rasped through cracked lips, taking a green stone with a hole through its center from a cord around his neck. He held out the Adder Stone in one hand, gory knife clutched in the other. “When’d you give this to me?”

Nell looked to the Adder Stone held in Adam’s hand, her solemn resignation to the illusion disrupted by the flickering of uncertainty in her eyes. The compass was a new addition as well, though she recognized the daffodil bloom she’d carefully laid into the face of it, the magic and flowers they’d made together under a full moon. “But I didn’t- I was gonna give you that after the date,” she mumbled, already chiding herself for how easily a couple of emotional trinkets could sway her mind towards what the demon world wanted her to see. But the compass wasn’t what he was asking about. The Adder Stone. Of course she remembered when she’d given it to him- the first of many things she’d gifted in an attempt to keep him safe.

“After Bea- after we...brought her back.” Nell had masqueraded the gift as a thanks for Adam’s help in bringing her sister back from the ether, but the truth had gone deeper than that. “I said it was for helping protect my family. But I just- the carachs had just given you those visions, and the somnivore thing wasn’t that far off.” It’d been nearly a year ago that she’d delivered the stone, nearly five months after their first meeting at the Ring, and by then she’d already gotten soft for him. “You were hurting and- I didn’t want you to hurt.” Taking the Adder Stone between her fingers, she swallowed hard as she held it before her face, already dreading the moment he’d disappear before her eyes. The motion sent her into a brief coughing fit, the heaves long and loud as her lungs desperately tried to dispel the poison in her system. At the end of it she finally raised the stone’s center to her eye, knowing this vision and her willingness to linger with even a false Adam had already shaved precious moments off the stopwatch that was ticking down the seconds until the poison got the best of her. “Let’s just- let’s get this over with.” It was silly, and she shouldn’t have said it knowing he was nothing more than an exhaustion or demon induced delusion. But she couldn’t help herself as the next words whispered from her lips, trying to find a moment of peace in a land that had never known it. “I miss you. I’ll miss you.”

Finally Nell looked through the stone’s center, still surprised at how solid it felt in her hands, wondering if that was another lie to be chalked up to feeling dead on her feet. Except Adam didn’t fade from view, didn’t disappear into nothingness as she locked her gaze onto his familiar and brown eyes. She gasped, still hardly believing it but reaching out nonetheless, letting the Adder Stone thump unceremoniously against his chest while its cord slackened and her hand found a gentle resting place alongside his cheek. Warmth. Perhaps a little too warm, as if he were running a fever. But there was the unmistakable feeling of life beneath her fingertips, and she didn’t hesitate a moment longer to close the space between them, slipping her other hand into his. Her knees grew even more unsteady, either from shock, barely having the energy to hold herself upright, or both— and for a moment she rested a little more weight against him than she probably should have considering his state. But it was impossible for her not to sink into the first safe place she’d found since the onychorror had snatched her. She’d finally found a place where she was safe in the hellhole. A place where she’d always been safe to crumble, to relieve her walls of their nearly ever-present duties. A place where she knew it was safe to fall because he’d never once stumbled when it came to catching her. “How- How did you- you’re real? Please- either this is a really good mindfuck or-” Or Tate had made good on his deal, and managed to get her hastily doctored sigil back to White Crest. Was it possible something had actually gone right? Had gone so right as to bring the man she loved to her side?

Adam let the knife fall from his hand onto the writhing ground and put his arms around Nell. There was a moment of tenseness, of resigned expectation. But she didn’t turn to mist, slip right through him, or boil up into some hungry thing. Tidal waves of relief and shock at something too impossibly good to be true collided in Adam’s chest. Nell was solid, real. Just a moment Adam couldn’t feel the heat of the burning sky or the poisons of alien worlds killing him cell by cell.

“I’m real,” Adam assured holding her tight with what strength was left in him. “I’m really here.” He entwined the fingers of their free hands. “I don’t want any other life except one with you in it,” the Hunter confessed, wasting precious water as the tears slid down his bloody and battered face.

“So uh...here I am.”

Nell could feel her own tears gathering in the corners of her eyes, an avalanche of relief washing over her near-ravaged spirit, almost still waiting for this moment to break in a way that left her spinning. But the moment never came, and Adam was breathtakingly solid within her arms. For a long breath she savored the peace he brought, like a salve over an open wound. She wanted to bury herself against him, to hide from the world around them and pretend like it didn’t exist, but the fear that he’d disappear if she so much as looked away from his gaze was too great, afraid to even blink lest the break in their eye contact be the blip of time needed for him to dissipate from under her hands.

She could feel her pulse gain a few extra beats while Adam made his declaration, heart in her throat while she ran his words on repeat through her mind. It was wrong. So wrong that such beautiful words should have to be uttered in a world as ugly as this one, spoken between the gasping breaths of a dying pair. Nell had always known that loving Adam wouldn’t be easy between his constant brushes with death, and the conditioning that often made him feel the need to put humanity’s welfare before anything else in his life. She’d done it nevertheless, having made peace with the fact that maybe he wouldn’t ever wholly be her’s, a part of him always belonging only to his mission. The pieces of him she’d been given had been more than enough. But that didn’t mean his admission didn’t tug at her heart, didn’t make it soar in a way that made a fluttering bloom in chest that had nothing to do with the poisonous air slowly killing her.

“Here you are,” Nell finally managed to repeat in wonder. Hadn’t he been the one trying to convince her to leave him behind should the demon apocalypse commence? He'd told her that she was a part of humanity’s hope for survival, that she should abandon him for the sake of the world. It was his own words that made her know the gravity of him choosing to come for her, to potentially sacrifice one of humanity’s hopes in the form of himself by searching for her in the endless worlds. And that was enough to keep her voice steady and sincere while she spoke. “I don’t want a life without you either.”

Part of Nell wanted to be upset with him, to scold him for being so foolish with his own life by following her into the portal, but she couldn’t manage to speak the words through the temporary moment of solace they’d found in the middle of hell— unwilling to break it. Unfortunately there was something else that needed to be said that would do just as good a job at shattering their moment of quiet. Something she couldn’t ignore. “There’s...something else I need to tell you.” Let her hold onto this shining feeling for just a few more seconds before she brought them back to reality.

Adam had grown up with the knowledge that his life wasn’t his own. It belonged to humanity’s destiny, a merciless idol that generations upon generations of his family had been sacrificed to appease. The abnegation of the self had been soothing in a way, it’d made him brave in a way. It doesn’t hurt to suffer and risk your life again and again if it isn’t truly yours to lose. He tried to never deceive the women in his life. Nobody deserved to be given only part of someone to love.

Mom and dad had loved each other intensely, and Adam had seen the aftermath after the needs of humanity had demanded yet another sacrifice. At the time he’d thought he’d learned a lesson from Esther Walker’s sorrow, and was determined to never hurt someone the way his father had.

But after three years of complete radio silence, Adam had spoken with mom and learned too late that he'd gotten it all wrong. As he’d grown, so had she, and neither mother or son were the same broken people that’d parted at Gehena 19.

Penelope was a person he shouldn’t have loved. She practiced demonology, the very art that’d fucked up the world in the first place. She’d participated in human trafficking and slavery. She’d performed ritual human sacrifice. She’d hunted down bounties without any concern for morality or a higher cause. She aided and abetted supernatural criminals simply because of her personal feelings. When these actions reaped consequences, Nell responded with personal wrath and revenge rather than seeking resolution, splintering tragedy into ever more fractals of repercussion.

Basically, by every standard he’d been raised to believe in, Penelope Vural was evil, and if she hadn’t been born human Adam would’ve been obligated to kill her.

But that’s not what happened. At first it’d just been that she was a useful ally. Next it'd just been typical horndog Adam, thinking with the head in his trousers rather than one on his shoulders again. Physical attraction and wary partnership had explained things for only so long however. She was brave, self-sacrificing, vivacious, and free to act according to passion and her free will in a way Adam had never dared to be. Eventually Adam was sharing things with her that he’d never dreamed of telling anyone else.

He wasn’t supposed to care about someone like Nell, to give her so much of what belonged to the mission. Adam could only love someone also sworn to fight the same war, no one else could understand the sacrifices necessary and what’d inevitably come sooner rather than later. Adam had been introduced to Huntresses his age with the unspoken understanding that eventually he’d find someone to fight alongside and raise children with to pass the sacred charge onto the next generation.

Adam had drank, partied, and screwed his way into forgetting for a while. Until suddenly, he ended up loving the wrong person, someone who wanted Adam for just himself, war be damned.

It wasn’t the right thing.

But what if he just….did y’know?

What he just loved Nell like she deserved without holding back, fight for his own humanity for a change?

Adam just wished he'd had the courage to take that plunge earlier.

Adam looked parted the embrace slightly so that he could meet her gaze “What is it Nell?”

Nell hadn’t planned to fall for Adam Walker, hadn’t even entirely noticed how close she’d let him get until she’d felt like she was on the edge of losing him, delivering the news that August Thompson had died a death far from peaceful— that Adam’s hand had been directly involved in the spellcaster’s demise. Of course she’d known he was one of the people she’d trusted most, one of the only people she’d ever let see her stripped to the core while he’d held her after Bea’s death. It was why she’d asked him to help in the first place. But she hadn’t realized just how much there was to lose until she was standing on the precipice. She’d been convinced that it would be the end, that she’d managed to ruin something before even really letting it begin, and that he wouldn't come back. It turned out she didn't need to worry about him coming back, because he’d never left in the first place. And he kept not leaving, something that had been rare in the life of a witch who had an overzealous temper and a reckless streak a mile wide.

So when he’d done things others might condemn or draw the line at— killed a werewolf in cold blood, admitted his own bloodlust beneath a full moon, gone on a murder spree fueled by the same moon, considered a demon pact, left her on read in the middle of feeling as if she were about to lose him...there’d been no choice of whether or not she’d grant him the same loyalty, to stay with him just as he’d stayed with her. She’d just wanted him to come home. And he always had. Even now, after fighting his way through literal hell, he’d come home.

Selfishly putting off her bad news for one moment longer, she let months of feeling the sun on her face when he smiled fill her soul, holding onto that feeling as she tried to find the words for what she wanted to say. What needed to be said if they didn’t make it out of this hellscape, and what she should have said much sooner despite being scared. She’d been worried about what he might say in reply, always thinking of that part of himself that she knew he felt he couldn’t give, not sure if she wanted to hear the ‘I’m sorry, but’ that she might get in response. But the man who’d dived into hell for her deserved to hear it, and she wasn’t scared anymore. “You know I love you, right?” He didn’t need to say it back, she’d finally realized that while he’d been walking towards her, knowing loving words could never speak as loudly as his actions had. “I just wanted you to know,” she assured him, letting him know she didn’t need to hear it in return. It wouldn’t change anything.

Now for the less charming of her news. “Not to...instantly bring the mood down but...the other thing I needed to tell you…” Nell glanced over her shoulder, as if the soul-snatching creature would be there even now as she divulged news of it. “There’s a...slaugh. I think it’s been following me.” Adam would know what it meant, that such creatures only went after those who were generally mere hours from dying, waiting to devour their souls. Nell had glimpsed it as she kept rubbing elbows with death in the hellscape, the being momentarily coming into focus while she’d barely escaped a demon encounter with her life still intact. The creatures were nearly as good at predicting death as banshees were.

Adam followed her gaze towards the burning horizon where plasma storms corrustated in lightning rainbows over living plains of crawling flesh. Slaugh were vultures of the spirit world. As a kid he’d been terrified of the invisible presences that set off his Hunter senses whenever there was a clash between militia forces around the Levant. It’d felt like a blizzard of dark wings, choking him with claustrophobia on empty arid plains covered in bodies shredded by shrapnel.

Mom had assured her son he wasn’t crazy. He could just feel the demons glutted humanity’s senseless wars against itself.

Adam‘s mind went back to Regan’s prophecy and felt an iron dread settle in his stomach, adding bittersweetness to the joy and relief coursing through his enervated body.

Adam let the future go and drew Nell close against him again, just letting this moment exist for as long as hell allowed. “We’ll figure it out when we get back to Earth ,” he murmured.

The tension in Nell’s shoulders melted as Adam pulled her back, savoring their togetherness for as long as she could, feeling true hope for the first time since...she wasn’t actually certain how long it had been, not even knowing how many days she’d been stuck in these hell-worlds. She drew a long breath while she was pressed against him, giving his hand a gentle squeeze to assure herself that he was still here- still real even though it seemed impossible that he was. When they got back to Earth. It seemed like a far off hope, like shooting for the moon without any of that bullshit optimism of landing among the stars. “Then you can tell me the plan when we find a place that’s not suffocating us.” He wouldn’t have come without one, right? It was one thing to condemn himself to death, and she wouldn’t be entirely surprised given his generally self-sacrificing nature, whether that had been taught, was natural, or a combination of the two. But it was another entirely to forfeit the life of her as well by diving in without an extraction plan. He wouldn’t have risked the person he was saving.

The slaugh was worrisome enough as an omen of death, but there’d been more to consider when it’s eating of souls was brought into play. Nell still wasn’t all that sure whether she’d want to be raised from the dead in the first place should she perish in the next twenty-four hours, but if the slaugh ate her soul...she wouldn’t have a choice to begin with. You couldn’t raise a body without a soul.

Again Nell fell silent while she drank in as much as this as she could, the dread in her stomach a constant reminder of how far there still was to go. But with Adam- at least she stood a chance. With Adam they could at least sleep, taking varied watches. And then maybe some of her magic would come back and Adam could heal, and then...well then they’d at least have a fighting chance together, always stronger together. Nell used her fragile strength to bring herself to the tips of her toes, trying to press a gentle kiss to his black-veined cheek before feathering across his lips. “We’ll figure it out when we get back to Earth,” she echoed, recognizing it as another promise they could hold between them. They’d go back to Earth together in the same way they’d fought the dolorphage, the way they’d faced an unknown future beneath the full moon all those months ago, and the same way they’d taken on a demon cult and lived to tell the tale— always together.

#// DON'T LOOK AT ME IM EMOTIONAL #as alwAYS tapir just gives me a GIFT of a chatzy #wickedswriting #chatzy #ch:adam #hell's true north #sibling death tw #mass poisoning tw #parental death tw

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