(AN: A bit on the short side, since it was done as commentfic for a meme on LJ, but I liked it enough to smooth out the kinks and throw it up here! God, I've been hitting a dry spell writingwise. Stupid summer!)
He has learned in the past that it works out better if you ask nicely, so he asks nicely. The first time.
"Er, Chel," he says, "d'you have any plans for tonight?"
"Miguel, are you actually stupid enough to try to ask me on a date?"
"No!" he says quickly, panicking, for that is not at all what he is asking. "I just - rather that - well I thought perhaps, it would be nice if you did have plans, so that maybe - " He gives up. "Could you possibly just...not be around, tonight?"
"Because you have plans?" she says, cocking an eyebrow up in a smirk.
Miguel bites his lip, because he does have plans. Or at least he really, really wants to. But they're plans that involve flowers and a couple candles and shirtless serenading, and they're just not exactly the sort of plans you can tell to the girlfrenemy/fuckbuddy/occasional business contact of your partner/best friend/secret crush.
"Well no," he says feebly, "not exactly."
"Good, because I don't. Not that involve going anywhere, anyway," she says. "I have to draw four or five more of those fake flyers up tonight if we want to get anywhere with this next con. I'd ask you to help, but..."
She trails off, and Miguel knows she is pausing for dramatic effect, forcing him to recall the one and only time he tried to do anything with pen and ink for a con, and how miserable it had turned out, how he was a musician but not an artist, how she was so much better than him at this just like so many other things. And he does recall it. And he scowls. And she plops down on the floor of the main room/Tulio's room/her room to work, and he retreats into the back room/storeroom/his and no one else's room, and flops onto his bedmat, and keeps scowling, up at the ceiling, and then over at the neat bundle of flowers in the corner, which he doesn't suppose he can really get his money back for now.
Asking nicely didn't work. So the second time, he's sneakier. He cries "Posters are up!"
as he's bumbling into the little set of rooms they're squatting, waving the parchment he's torn down off the wall of some building or other in the square. Tulio looks up from the small mound of gold pieces he's counting (and re-counting, and triple-checking, some obsessive-compulsive monetary tic), and Chel looks up from filing her nails, sprawled out on the bedmat she and Tulio have taken to sharing.
"Posters?" asks Chel, but Tulio grins at him, because he knows all the things that Chel hasn't learned yet, and one of those is that the new WANTED posters tend to go up on Wednesdays, which is what today is. Miguel doesn't bother to explain - she should have learned it by now. Instead he takes a small moment of hogging Tulio to himself, leaning into his bone-skinny frame as they buzz together with edgy energy.
"How do we look?" he sighs, hovering over Miguel's shoulder to see, hip on his hip, hand on the small of his back.
"Charming, as always, though they never can seem to get my hair quite right." Or your eyes, he thinks, reveling in the light that's all but shining from Tulio's face in this, one of his few remaining childlike excitements. "But the star of the moment isn't you or I, Tulio, but our fine lady friend!"
"Come again?" says Chel, finally tossing down the file, finally allowing herself to look interested.
He pauses, for dramatic effect, and then, "Check yourself out!" He whips it around to face her, and she stares with no small amount of pride at her own round, teasing face, winking out at her from parchment and black ink.
"Not bad," she intones a bit flatly, "except for my nose." But she's preening, and Tulio is grinning even harder.
"You've made it to the big leagues now, babe!" he shouts, crossing from Miguel to throw an arm around her shoulder, to poke her in the ribs. No hand in the small of her back. Every sentence a pet name. "And look at how much they're willing to pay! Your pretty little figure is already worth four from the lawhouse."
"And you're surprised?" she snipes, squashing his scruffy chin in her petite hand. "I don't come cheap you know!"
"Well if you ask me, you should treat yourself!" says Miguel, forcing the smile back into his voice. "In honor of your smashing poster debut, a night on the town. Or at least the less particular part of it." He waggles his eyebrows, and crosses his fingers, praying that it works. The heat from the hand in the small of his back hasn't vanished, it never does, and Miguel is practically thrumming at the thought of more, if only his plans could go right, for once.
"That's a great idea!" But Chel hasn't shouted this, it's Tulio, because Tulio is the one who can make the plans, and he's got her by the hips and is swinging her around. "We'll blitz all over the place, and to hell with the man! Surely Carlos values our patronage more than our reward."
"With how much we drank last time? He might sell us out just to get rid of the nuisance," Miguel chuckles. "I think Chel deserves a night to herself. We're old hat at this poster thing, no need for us to celebrate. Let's just stay in and let her enjoy the finer, feminine things in life."
"Like you don't enjoy the finer, feminine things in life," she says suggestively. "You know it's not a party unless you two are there, and if you're suggesting a party, I'm not going to say no."
So they all go out, all three of them. And they all get drunk, and they all stagger back in the wee hours of the morning, and they all - for once - fall into their separate beds asleep. Miguel knows it, because he always gets up first to make breakfast after nights like this, and that fierce Chinese tea to clear their heads, and he sees the two of them, him splayed out with legs askew on his own mat, and her curled tight in a ball on her own. Of course nothing went how he planned, he thinks. It was Wednesday, the day of posters, the day of Mercury.
The third time is straight-out bribery.
"Ten."
"No."
"Twenty?"
"No. Miguelito, I have plenty of pocket change, since I'm pretty good at getting it out of other people's pockets on my own. Why are you so dead-set on kicking me out of here, ah?"
"You're always here!" he snaps, letting it get the better of him, letting the dream he had last night get the best of him. He has to regroup. "I just - don't you have any girlfriends or something?" Girlfriends, and not boyfrenemy/fuckbuddy/occasional business contacts? "I'm - worried, about you, that you don't get a chance to live parts of life you might want to. We're not everything, here, it might be nice for you to get a change of pace." There, that sounded - reasonable. Rational. Not at all like all his logical mind lately has been obscured by thoughts of slim shoulders and hot hands and a biting voice in a biting mouth biting at -
"Miguel," she deadpans, "what is going on here," and it's not a question. Which is good, because he doesn't have an answer.
"I'm only thinking of you," he says, and other than pretending to be a god, it is perhaps the biggest lie he has ever told.
"And I'm thinking of you," she says, "and I think that you're an idiot."
"...Thirty?"
"No! Agh, by the blasted gods, the two of you are acting crazy! Ask me again when you're going to tell me the damn truth." And she storms back into the little set of rooms they're squatting, and so it is he who must spend the night out, wandering alone, drinking alone, sulking alone, because no one does a sulk like Miguel. No one else does such a hard, miserable sulk that he would miss what Chel has said, the way that Chel has said the two of you, and the implications that might have.
Instead, he sleeps until midday or later the following afternoon, thankfully without dreaming. When he does get up, he goes out again, lifting a couple of purses and also an apple, which he chomps away at for a few bites before finding a worm and grimacing. He passes a set of the posters, and laughs a bit to himself, and after a moment allows himself some pettiness and smears a mud mustache right underneath Chel's supposedly misdrawn nose. It makes him feel better for about five minutes and worse for about an hour. That, he thinks, is the problem here, has always been the problem. Even when it's the one thing he wants most in the world, Miguel cannot bring himself to be cruel. If craving and craving without ever being satisfied hurts, seeing other people suffer on top of all that only hurts worse, and if it takes him being miserable to watch the rest of the world keep turning happily then Miguel will do it. Even if it means all of his plans fail. Even if it means he has to content himself with red-hot hands in the small of his back and neat bundles of flowers that just wilt in the back room/storeroom/his and no one else's room.
He kicks a rock down the cobbled street all the way back to their rooms, and opens the door glumly, intending to go straight to bed. Instead, he catches himself just in time to avoid tripping over a lit candle, which he easily could have knocked over, setting the rest of the room on fire. There are several other candles, and also a neat bundle of flowers, and also Tulio. Holding the flowers. Shirtless.
"Wha - " he croaks, and then, when he can find words, finds the entirely wrong ones: "But where's Chel?"
"I asked her if she wouldn't mind going out for the night," Tulio says, taking a couple of steps toward him.
"But - how? How did you get her to leave?"
"I told her I was planning on seducing you."
"Well damnit how was I supposed to know that was all I needed to do?" And he snatches the flowers out of Tulio's arms and puts himself in them, his hands on the small of his back, which is a wonderful place for them, really, when the biting mouth with the biting voice is biting red-hot and soft at his neck, his partner/best friend/not-so-secret crush/lover, and the flowers are slowly wilting on the floor.