Come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine- (shine on you crazy diamond, pink floyd)
When the dust finally settles—and Kate decides to leave them behind this time for independence instead of death, and with all the hate and rage she could possibly feel for him still laced into the very center of her beating heart despite saving each other from Hell—Richie begins to treat Matanzas like a bad taste in his mouth, and like with all lingering unpleasantries in Richie's life, it has to be washed away from memory… preferably with three ice cubes and a tumbler of scotch.
Only three months have passed since they've saved humanity from the end of world and Seth and he went back to Jackknife Jed's with a battled-worn Kisa in tow, but it feels like so much longer.
Richie feels even more isolated and disgraceful than he had felt before the rise of Hell's queen, Kate's rushed revival, and Opening of the Xibalba's Asshole had descended upon them all that time ago… it is especially bad since he can only recall these last intertwining months, comprised of a multitude of drunken blackouts, scores that were meant to pay only to end up with twisted and broken bodies of the innocent littering the ground, and so much more loss of Richie's people then the brothers had ever faced when trying to stop Amaru.
And all of that spilt blood and failure has made the Gecko name mean next to nothing within the criminal underworld and, honestly, Richard's fucking surprised that some of their rivals haven't tried to come in on their enterprise and assassinate them in their sleep with a single bullet to the brainpan, like humanly taking out a worthless dog when it no longer serves its purpose. –Hell, Richard would fucking welcome that bullet if he could actually die from it—But then again, he figures trying to take the Geckos out of commission would be like a quick walk through the park. There's just no real value to gain in their deaths—especially Seth's. Just no great challenge to be had.
They've lost their touch. Jackknife Jed's is on the verge of collapse, and the brothers could simply care less. They no longer have that almost otherworldly, extra special edge that's always made the Gecko name such an unstoppable force of nature to their investors… a deathly presence to be reckoned with to those that oppose them… But now… the name doesn't have any weight in heist game. It used to be bragged about…Their impeccable reputation of being professional to a fault combined with a high success rate raised their extensive street credit to the great heights from which it had fallen. They were so good at alarming their enemies just by their reputation that even their foes never saw them as arrogant assholes overcompensating for something.
But their very obvious and ever growing PTSD has begun to erode their indifference to danger and their ability to snuff out innocent lives in their pursuit of profit. Seth literally shakes down to the soles of his shoes when the time for him to point a loaded gun in some poor bystander's face crops up.—Richie imagines that Seth thinks about when Richie had forced him to hold a knife over Ximena's head, yelling at him to just fucking kill her already!…"No, Richard! This is not who we are! We are not killers!" —And he can't say that he really blames him.
They may be broken beyond repair; the loose pieces of their psyches come undone off their already unstable hinges as their ever-growing paranoias and fears have made them even more unpredictable than ever before… violent to work with and prone to get in trouble before they even get the chance to see the inside of a bank nowadays. Seth's walking away from more jobs than they're quitting, and the ones that Richie can stop him from running away from are kiddie errands… insulting inquiries for chump change only meant to appease the budding criminal or starving amateur, and Richie knows at the rate they're going, they'll never be able to restore Jackknife's to its former glory. Not before Amaru sunk her teeth in and tore everything they had worked for apart.
But they just can't. They can't go back to being the monsters that haunt the darkest regions of people's dreams… the deep-seated things that keep them awake at night…They are no longer okay being what makes them want to scream at the top of their lungs as the unmistakable sound of a gun cocking continues to ring in their ears with an almost maddening beat in their stream of unconsciousness. They're not willing to be an unrelenting constant that bleeds into the harsh reality of their victims' lives. Not when they themselves have looked down into the abyss and seen real evil look back at them.
Everything's become so different now… changed in a way that prevents them from remaining cool and polished in the face of evil. Richie can't even walk past a mother and her child without imagining what the world would be like if Seth and Kate hadn't defeated Amaru… if he had failed to conquer Hell. What would they do? These unsuspecting people, walking around without a care in the world… Could they handle the burden of knowing that there are such things that really do go bump in the night without a drink in their hands or dope in their veins?
Can they face down a monster made for the sole purpose of swallowing and devouring them whole… a creature made to feed off your fears…to tear you apart from the inside out… and not chase those memories away with water-downed booze? Are they stronger than him and his brother? Can they pass Richie on by and not blame him for his shortcomings… for his failures? Because Goddamnit, he tried. He had tried so hard to be the good guy who saves the world… who wants nothing in return. But he wants… oh god, does he want…
Richie wants to be the hero… the savior… the one that people look to and hang the sun and moon upon. He doesn't want to be the bad guy; the selfish bastard who only looks out for number one, forced to watch, helpless and heartbroken, as the sweetest, most God-loving girl he's ever known bleeds out in his arms, cursing his name to hell with her last breath…the type of guy who provokes such an ambitious, young doctor to possibly throw away her budding career just to hang out in a seedy bar for months and seek bittersweet revenge for her estranged father with a single shotgun shell to his ribcage.
He can't go back to being that man anymore. He just doesn't have the energy left in him to be that stuck ever again, abandoned on an unapproachable island… so hated and so far away from civilization— salvation—that he begins to crave its intangible presence in his life. Richie won't allow himself to go backwards—back to the blood, the screams, and the heartache. Not when he's finally had a taste of what it feels like to finally make his brother proud of him for once.
Destiny may have proven that Richie is the farthest thing from a saint, but it also taught him that he isn't the ravaged wolf he's always believed himself to be… clever and lonesome…his teeth snapping and gnawing on the bone dust of those he's mowed down in his path to something better—Kate's among them—with their snuffed out aura dry on the roof of his mouth. He won't continue to be the wolf, the villain, in their sick little life story…not when Xibalba's become the real monster in sheep's clothes, an inescapable force that plagues his every waking moment—
Richie takes another long sip of his whiskey, letting himself drown in the burning sensation the liquor provides, washing away his every thought with each shallow. He doesn't want to think about that anymore. Richie started drinking specifically so that he doesn't have to…so that he can shut that deep-seated nightmare, that all-consuming guilt down… locking those feelings—those memories— away with all the rest of the evil harbored in his soul. He learned a long time ago that no good comes from dwelling on what's happened—what could have been—especially when there's amber liquid still swirling around in his glass to choke down.
Alcohol has become a welcomed distraction, a newfound pastime. Something that he can grip and hold on tight to. Lately, getting drunk has become one of the only things that Richie has left that he can count on never failing him. He can always get drunk, but he can't always promise that he won't someday become the villain. Liquors, beverages of all kinds have become Richard Gecko's best friend …a confidante, pain reliever…He doesn't care that the crippling loneliness that's always sat deep and hollow in his chest has expanded, taking over everything that he is and eating him from the inside out…because when he has a drink in his hand, nothing else matters except where his next drink is going to come from.
Seth's beginning to hate him for it. He knows that he's starting to become just like their father—careless and snarly and violent—but Seth may or may not be shooting up that damn smack into his veins again—and Richie can't bear to be around him without being reminded of what he could have possibly become if Seth hadn't met Carols and hatched the plan to have Richard break him out of jail and one step closer to El Rey… Wasted off of Santanico's whispers of belonging, driven crazy by loneliness—so he really doesn't have any room to fucking judge him.
And Seth doesn't. It's kind of hard to be judgmental of someone when you yourself have gone missing for the last two weeks. His brother disappeared about two of the longest weeks of Richie's messed up life ago. Left without a single word said, has had absolutely no contact with him. Seth's become a complete ghost, no trace of him left on the planet to search for, and Richie's begun to believe that he's dead in a ditch somewhere, but he doesn't care.
He stopped caring about two days in when Jackknife got a new shipment of Mexican Mezcal in stock—there's also a new case of the blue agave that comes in as well, but he steers away from it like his ass is on fire... too many memories attached that he'd rather forget—and he stopped worrying by the third bottle into the crate.
And by the sixth bottle, he begins to be able to quiet the whispers of Amaru's ethereal promises—that beautiful, twisted mind of yours will have a place in hell… with me—echoing in his ear on repeat. By the tenth, Kate's dying words—I hope you burn in hell—have stopped haunting him for the time being… no longer clawing and tearing at the base of his skull, threatening to melt his brain to a puddle with the overwhelming urge to just give up and give in…to succumb to the call for him to finally come home and be welcomed with open arms to a realm where his warped mind can come out and play with acceptance… to make his long-held wish to belong somewhere finally come true…unleash that deep and innate wickedness buried within himself and let it take over and be set free with a beautifully powerful woman at his side—Well that is the dream, isn't it, Richard?" the ghost of a defeated queen questions him about a billion shots in, the voice still just as inhuman and cold in the drunken and hazy corridors of his dark mind as in stark reality, "To get rich and fat and die in the arms of a beautiful women… but then again, I'm not the one you—"
"Shut up!" He yells drunkenly in the darkness of Jackknife Jed's, cutting off the venomous words swirling around in his head abruptly. He's not going to let the drunken illusion of some washed-up queen allow that train of thought to bloom and grow any further. No matter how wasted he was. He's worked too damn hard these last few hours trying to bury it deep and forgot it. He's laid that to rest. It's done. It's over… Kate hates him. Kate left him. End of story.
He refuses to let some dead, man-hating bitch—or Kate—crumple all his hard earned work. He's not the enemy in this game, nor will he let them turn him into one. Nope, not in this lifetime or the many he'll live hereafter. Richie controls where he lets his destiny take him, not the other way around. He's allowed to enjoy a few—hundred—drinks without being labeled as a piece of shit. Without proving them right, giving merit to their shared hatred of him. He's still a good man. He's still worth loving—
Amaru chuckles bitterly in his mind, long and condescending, as she reads his thoughts, and Richie tenses, laying his face down in a wet spot on the surface of the mahogany bar stand. His vision blurred by nearly a thousand shots of Wild Turkey and Mazcal and Grey Goose—no blue agave… never blue agave—his head somehow beginning to swim with images of Kate bleeding…dead…her gaze baleful and angry upon his as he watches her take her last breath… just like in Matanzas, her breath revived with life, the rage muted but her hate still there… never ending, and—
Oh, Richard, the queen of hell whispers to him in the drunken haze of his memories. Her lips are a disgusted sneer. Her voice still holding that twinge of superiority over his race. You're pathetic, she hisses in a voice that almost sounds eerily like Kate's.
Richie just groans at her words.
Have another drink…
He does.
TBC...