Author's Note: After watching Sicario 2, I was left with a mighty need for all things Kate x Alejandro and Carina/Isabel. So, here it is, the product of my longing :) Enjoy!

DISCLAIMER: not mine.

Part 1: Numb

Alejandro: "But would you leave me / If I told you what I've done / And would you leave me / If I told you what I've become / 'Cause it's so easy to say it to a crowd / But it's so hard, my love / To say it to you out loud" (Florence Welch - No light, no light, from Useless Magic, Lyrics and Poetry)

His wife had always complained that he wasn't an easy person to shop for.

So every holiday and birthday and special ocassion, he'd kiss her on her pretty lips and tell her she'd given him the best gift of all. Her love. Her devotion. Their daughter.

But she'd still wanted to get him something nice for Christmas.

So that one Christmas - their last, the only one he remembers, where they're safe and hale and whole - alongside the presents for his wife and daughter, there is also something for him.

'You always drink out of those horrible plastic cups. Cheap coffee, cheap cups. No one should live like that', his wife had said, laughing at his clumsy attempts to unwrap the shiny thermos cup.

I'll make you coffee every morning, Papa. And you can take it to work with you.

Alejandro had touched his chin and kissed his daughter on the forehead.

Thank you.

My treasure.

Now, he sips water through a straw and wills the pain away.

He can't even remember what happened with that cup.

And there's no one to blame for his memories fading.

No one, but himself.

Alejandro pops another painkiller and falls into his troubled sleep.

Isabel: "No more dreaming like a girl so in love with the wrong world" (Florence Welch - Blinding, from Useless Magic, Lyrics and Poetry)

Ben makes her smoothies every morning that leave a bitter taste in her mouth. Jen does yoga and runs and promises her a puppy if she's good.

Good, good, good.

And Carina is good. A good little girl to good little parents.

Now, Ben and Jen are nice enough, like permanently smiling cardboard figures. Blank and boring and safe.

You're going to be safe. We need you safe. You'll be safe.

But she doesn't feel safe. She doesn't feel much of anything anymore.

Sometimes, Jen takes her out in the backyard, to get some sun, honey.

She doesn't like the sun though. The sun over the deep green woods is gentler than the harsh desert sun, but Carrie - Carina Jenkins, must always remember that - wants to forget. They didn't have to tell her - this is your life now, this is your truth - she'd wanted to. Needed to. Forget. The house beyond the border, the baby, the grieving father - the man who saved her. The man who died. Shot like a dog. She'd wanted to forget.

Carrie goes with Jen to the backyard, but sits on the porch. In the shadows, where the sun and the desert of her broken memories can't touch her.

On the shadowed porch, Carrie doesn't even register the needle taking Isabel Reyes further and further away from her.

Doesn't feel a thing.

Kate: "I look around but I can't find you / If only I could see your face / I start rushing towards the skyline / I wish that I could just be brave / I must become a lion hearted girl / Ready for a fight / Before I make the final sacrifice" (Florence Welch - Rabbit Heart, from Useless Magic, Lyrics and Poetry)

There are truths that make up one's life that are hard to swallow.

Truth number one: the will to live is stronger than anything, principles be damned.

Kate used to have a problem with that, used to hate herself for it. How easily she gave in. That even before she felt the cold kiss of the gun, she had already given in to a pair of sad, sad eyes and to hands that had saved and damned her all with one touch.

In the aftermath, in the wake of Alejandro's retreating shadow, lumbering away from her parking lot, she felt like she'd been robbed of more than her morals. She'd been robbed of her identity. She felt as if what burdened Alejandro's steps, what grounded the ghost, was Kate herself. And what was left, the shell of her former self, the non-Kate, wasn't worth much of anything at all.

Dave and the job were easy to leave - Reggie less so. He'd refused to let that doughy prick mess with her career, her hard work, with her.

Like a child, he'd tail her - what happened, what happened, what happened?

The tunnels were easy to write off. Alejandro in her kitchen, Alejandro and his gentle hands, Alejandro and his killer eyes, that shit still scared her. And Reggie did not need a scared little girl busting doors to corpse-filled houses and getting him killed.

Reggie sort of gets his way eventually. The Bureau has her looking for missing persons in Wyoming - it's cold enough and far enough to please the ghost of Alejandro, who nods approvingly from the dark corner of Kate's mind that it now occupies.

Don't punish yourself for what those assholes did. Kate, this isn't your fault.

Oh, but it is. She signed the paper.

Kate doesn't pack a thing and leaves. She'll pick something on the way.

Truth number two: hate is much easier to feel. It is effortless. But love… love hurts.

It haunts her, what Reggie said.

Those assholes. Those pricks. Those motherfuckers.

Matt, she understands - he's the hustler, the man who says what he needs to be said to get things done. He'll make deals with devils and play the part - any part: the moron with a shark's smile, the shark with a gun at the ready, stepping over bodies in disposable footwear because the pool of blood he leaves behind is that deep.

It will come to bite him in the ass eventually. Matt is a soldier, a good little one, and as any good little soldier, he answers to other people - people elected to office, not appointed to it, like Dave used to say - and they will betray him, discard him like he discarded her.

Kate may have walked away with her life, but Matt knows too much, is too much to be silenced by another man's grief when death and retribution comes knocking at his door.

Kate almost wishes she was there when that happens, because there is a part of her that is as mean and petty as the worst of them.

In all fairness, Matt doesn't trouble her that much - apart from the very objective fact that he is an asshole and a man and Kate's dealt with enough of those in her line of work to last her several lifetimes. The fact that he is physically stronger than her even at the height of her passion and aggressiveness doesn't help much either. But Kate has enough time on her hands now - sleep doesn't come easily or at all - so she hits the gym and does yoga and keeps her body busy, hoping the buzz of a punishing workout will silence the wailing in her brain. Wyoming is good for that. The weather shapes and sculpts her body more fiercely than any personal trainer at the local gym ever could.

She's well into her third month there when it happens - the event that triggers the birth of the second truth that now defines her existence.

Wyoming doesn't get the spring memo - mountains are still covered in snow and snow storms slither in and out of the little town she's stationed in before blasting roads apart. This is as good time as any to catch up on the paperwork and make the Bureau happy.

So Kate wades not through dead bodies hidden in sun-burnt Arizona walls but through cases so old, even the ghosts of those poor missing souls have been forgotten. She composes statistics, accepts the pitying looks and the bad coffee and works herself to numbness to the backdrop of howling winds and rattling windows.

Until there is a victim. A body lost in the snow.

In retrospect, it's one of Kate's poorer decisions. She splits up from her liaison - who knows the mountain better - because the storm is coming and they have a lot of ground to cover. Kate has a nose for dead bodies - they follow her everywhere. She doesn't need tracks in the snow or winds whispering secrets to her. If anything, the spirits lead her straight to them. She is sure footed on the snow and she finds the body first.

The mountain finds her second.

Kate doesn't remember much of the minutes, hours, days she spent with a half eaten corpse, a mountain lion trapped between steel jaws and her own mangled leg.

The sheriff is not a religious man, but he crosses himself near her hospital bed and kisses her softly on the forehead.

There is a spell around you, Katie. The dead protect you.

Kate doesn't need pills to sleep that night - she cries herself unconscious.

Oh, how right he is.

She thinks of Alejandro's little girl disappearing into a vat of acid, thinks of Alejandro's wife ripped to pieces and defiled, thinks of the rage and hatred that has shaped Alejandro into the man who'd put a gun to her head and taken her innocence from her, and then thinks of the hands that had murdered children but had not murdered her.

Sadly, the flame of hatred she had nurtured all these long months after she took aim and didn't fire sputters and dies.

Kate leaves Wyoming feeling numb - not because she's high on pain meds for her leg, but because there is now something else other than hatred settling fretfully in her chest, burning from behind her breast. She dares not wake it.

Truth number three: Alejandro may have violated her innocence and plundered her moral high ground, but he has not murdered her goodness. One day, Kate will know what to do with this gift.

But not today.

Not today.

A/N: Thank you for reading! If you've enjoyed this, I look forward to reading your review :)