Disclaimer: I do not, in any manner, shape or form, own anything that is related to El Tigre, let alone the television show, its characters and story lines themselves, however much I wish I did. But then, if we all got what we wanted in life, then how could we consider ourselves alive at all?


Time moves in interesting ways. Sometimes the entire fate of a world can be changed by something as seemingly important as long, bloody revolution that results in the freedom of a group of colonies from a smaller group of islands half a world away or as something as seemingly insignificant as a maiden deciding how many lumps she wants in her tea, one or two.

And sometimes, the pants of time opens up, giving us two tunnel to go down. The tunnels may appear to be and in fact are much the same tunnels, may be so mundanely ordinary that the common traveler can't tell that they are coming to a fork in the tunnel, which pants hole they're going down, but ultimately, depending on which tunnel a passenger takes, it could lead to the success of the hero or the victory of the villain, of the survival of an alien race or the death of millions of lives.

And the pants of time opens up everywhere, in all dimensions, even in dimensions where free will is said to nothing but an illusion, as intangible the air in front of your nose and as unreal as a non-homophobic Republican dictator. They even open in the lives of small blue-haired teenagers, such as a one Frida Suárez.

"Beep! Beep! Beep!" went Frida Suárez's alarm clock, which informed her newly awakened, drowsy self that it was approximately 8:30 am. She turned to her calendar, which hung on the wall next to her bedroom door, to see what day it was. It said that it was a Saturday.

Muttering "Stupid alarm clock, waking me up at 8:30 on a Saturday," she laid back down to sleep. As she tried to fall asleep, she began to wonder, "Why did my alarm clock go off? I mean, I always turn it off during the weekends, how did I forget to turn it off this time?"

She thought of this for a little while more as sleep reclaimed her, until she began to lightly dream again. However, she wasn't completely asleep. She knew that she was only half-asleep, that there was that faint, annoying feeling that she was still partially conscious, but she stubbornly tried to ignore it and turned over in her half-sleep.

As she dreamed, various images came swimming from her dreams to her half-conscious-self: there were some things familiar, like taquitos, zebra-donkeys, and churros, and some things unfamiliar, strange or outright bizarre: a gold ball, a sound of shrill, high-pitched laughter, and a warm, kindly pale face. These things both comforted Frida and frightened her, in a way that she could not describe. Then, the image of her best friend Manny came to mind.

Friend. As if that term could be used anymore. Frida Suarez, age 16, had not only found love in her best friend, Manuel Rivera, but also when she had finally come out to him a few days ago, he actually said that he felt the same and wanted to be her boyfriend.

Naturally, she jumped at the chance. They had even sealed the contract with a kiss. It was a short kiss, without much heat in it, but it still made Frida blush, even now, in her half-sleep.

"Sweet, sweet Manny. Sigh," thought Frida. She continued to think of her new boyfriend, and of her alarm clock, until something in her head clicked, and suddenly it was all clear to her.

FridaSuárez shot of her bed as if she electrical wires underneath her skin had sent 10,000 volts through her.

"Of course!" she thought to herself, as she hurried to change, taking off her fuzzy pink sleep mask and slippers. "How could I forget!? It's Manny's and mine first week anniversary since becoming a couple! Duh! We're supposed to meet at the Ice Cream Parlor at 10:00 to start off our day-long date together!"

Frida changed her clothes, taking off her black-skulled t-shirt and heart-adorned pants and replacing them with her usual clothes, her white-shirt, over-all skirt combo, with her spiky wristbands, goggles and boots. She checked the time. It was 9:42 am. If she ran, she just might make it.

Rushing downstairs, Frida ran through the kitchen, to snag something to eat on the way to the Ice Cream Parlor. She had hoped that there would be nobody in there, so she could just leave the house without any fuss, but this time, the gods didn't look kindly on Frida. Her mother was in the kitchen, frying eggs and toast for her twin sisters, Nikita and Anita, both of whom were, for once, out of their police cadet uniforms and instead, ever the patriots wore red and white pajama shorts and green t-shirts. It was only a mercy that her father wasn't there, waiting for breakfast too.

"He must be at work," Frida thought to herself, before her mother noticed her presence and turned to her while managing to keep an eye on the stove.

"Oh hija, good morning! How are you? Did you sleep well?" asked Carmela with a warm smile.

"Sí, good morning hermana," said Nikita and Anita in unison.

"¡Mamá! I'm fine! And yes, I slept well," said Frida, acting as if she was exasperated, in hopes that would convince her not to ask anymore questions, in fear that she might ask her about Manny, which she always did. Her new relationship with Manny was a secret, as was their day-long date. Of all people, she hated lying to her mother, but she would, if it was for Manny.

"Well, that's nice, hija," said Carmela, not really paying attention.

For once, Frida smiled at her mother's neglect for her youngest child and started to search throughout the kitchen for anything small enough to eat on the go but large enough to be more than a mouthful. However, there didn't seem to be anything to eat in the kitchen that fit that description. There were nothing edible to eat in the cupboards, the pantry was bare and she wasn't going to dare check the refrigerator. The last time she was desperate enough to open that thing she had nearly been eaten by the super-intelligent growth inside.

"Hey, Mom! Is there anything to eat in this house?" asked Frida.

Carmela frowned.

"Well," she said. "You could sit down at the table with your sisters and I could make you some eggs. How would you like them: Sunny-side up or scrambled?"

"But I'm supposed to meet Manny at the Ice Cream Parlor in less than 15 minutes!" cried Frida desperately.

"What? You're hanging out with that Rivera kid again? Hija, you know that your father disapproves of your friendship with that child. He is bad news!" said Carmela.

"Gezz mom! If I did every thing papa told me to do, I'd be one of the prissy little Miss Perfect Junior Police Cadets over there," groaned Frida, motioning towards her sisters.

"Hey! We're not prissy!" protested Nikita and Anita in unison.

"Oh yeah? Then why are you two still wearing your Junior Police Cadet badges on your pajamas?" asked Frida mockingly.

Nikita and Anita, by this time fuming, couldn't come up with anything in their outrage and just boiled.

Carmela said, "Frida, you know better than to bait your sisters like that," lecturing her yet again.

"But they were just asking for it!" said Frida.

"Still, that is no reason to insult your sisters like that."

Grumbling in response, Frida turned back to the kitchen cabinets. "Are you sure we don't haveanything to eat Mom? Anything I can carry with me on the go?"

"Not really, no. But, hija, I still don't want you to go out with Manny today. We had plans to go out shopping for clothes since the start of this month, remember?" asked Carmela, almost pleadingly. She knew that she neglected her youngest from time to time, and it was ridiculous to even her that it took her an entire month in advance to take Frida out for just one day.

Frida grimaced. She did have plans with her mom to go out shopping. Granted, whenever her mom took her out pleasure-shopping, whether it was for clothes, jewelry, shoes, or make-up, her mother always tried to buy her things that were far too girly for her tastes. But still, it was the thought that counted in the end.

But this time, Frida had forgotten about her monthly mother-daughter shopping spree in favor of remembering about her day-date with Manny, and while Frida loved her mother dearly, she loved Manny more.

Uncomfortable about the whole thing, Frida said, "Well, actually mom, I sort of made plans with Manny to spend the day with him. Could we reschedule the shopping to next week?"

"No; the soonest that I could schedule in another shopping with you hija is next month. Are you really certain that you have to hang out with Manny today? Can't you just hang out tomorrow? You can always hang out with him every day of the week, but you can only come shopping with me once a month, today!"

"But Mom! It's really important to both of us that we hang out today!" whined Frida.

If one pays close enough attention, you could see the two tunnels coming up quite fast. Remember, it doesn't take long for one person to make a life-altering decision.

Sighing, Carmela disappointedly said, "Well, if it's both that important to you, how can I say no? Here, here's a five. You can stop by Mr. Felix's fruit store and pick up an apple or pear for yourself," handing her daughter the five dollar peso, a small shiny bronze coin with a silver center (A/N: If anyone would like to correct me on what type of material a Five dollar peso is made out of, I would gladly do so).

By some human's standards, this tunnel could be seen as either the best choice ultimately possible or the absolute worst choice on the face of the earth. It depends on how you look at.

A smile quickly spread across Frida's face. "Oh, thank you mama! Thank you, thank you, thank you!" she said, getting her mother into a death grip.

"You're…welcome…hija….Now, could you let me go…before I…pass out?" asked Carmela, whose face had went straight blue and was turning a light shade of purple.

"Oops! Hee he, don't know my own strength sometimes," mumbled Frida, before she zipped out the door.

Carmela watched her daughter disappear in the subsequent dust cloud. Sighing, she turned back to her frying pan. Finishing Nikita and Anita's eggs, she flipped them onto their plates and put the plates on the table, in front of her eldest daughters, who had the decency to remain quiet for once and ate their breakfast in silence.

Cleaning up the mess that the eggs had made of the counter-top, Carmela put the frying pan in the sink and started to scrub it despondently. She wanted to be a good mother, and she tried, she really did try. It's just that whenever she tried to be with Frida and be the mother that her own mother never was, Frida would always find some excuse or have something more important planned or even skip out of her mother-daughter bonding days without even telling why.

It was as if Frida didn't even want her in her life sometimes, and yet Carmela knew that her daughter was constantly trying to seek approval from both her and the rest of the family. But, whenever she did try to be a part of Frida's life, she would always push her away, whether she knew it herself or not. It was enough to make even the most optimistic and cheerful of mothers want to cry sometimes.

Well, maybe we will get to go out next month," thought Carmela hopefully. "And maybe I could even schedule in another day or two to do other things as well!"

With a sense of satisfaction, a small smile crossed Carmela's depressed face and her sadness was gently lifted. If her plans ever come true, then maybe one day Carmela and Frida could have an ordinary and happy mother-daughter relationship together.

Unfortunately however, they will not. There will not be another mother-daughter days, and Carmela will not be able to arrange another day or two into the next month. For Frida Suárez, there is no such thing as "the next month." In fact, for her, there isn't even a "tomorrow."


Far away, a continent away, in one of London's best leading hospitals, an elderly and sickly woman, age 94, is dying. It is quite natural for people to die. It's the one thing the livings do best. And, at 94, some people would say that she must have had a long and fulfilling life, one full of happiness, sorrow, pain, and love. Others would say that she is lucky to have lived this long and that even if she lived a live filled with pain and misery that she should be happy to have lived at all. Still others would simply say that, damn, 94, now that's a long time to live.

None of these things, however, are the things being thought of in this hospital room. As far as these things go, it was a nice hospital room. It was a somewhat small room, given the occupant's age and lack of chance of survival, but still, it was a nice room. It had teal painted walls and various important looking cabinets in it. There was a small T.V. hanging from the ceiling, turned off for the dying occupants comfort. That was all it was about now, comfort. At age 94, not most people doubt just what you will be dying from, so the room's medicine reflected the woman's ultimate medicine: easing you off into the great unknown.

There were IV tubes, monitors were hooked up to the patient that monitored her unsteady heart and respiration rate, machines that checked her body temperature and blood pressure and several other useless tools that were being ultimately wasted on someone who could die from a faint puff of wind.

Her remaining living relatives, her 49-year-old daughter and 36-year-old son, Michelle and Samuel, her faceless husband whose name she never bothered to remember, and her grandchildren, Ashley (age 21) and Max (age 19), were the only ones in the room at the moment. Their doctor had left them to help save another, more likely to live patient, one who had greater prospects for the future, and now they were just waiting to hear the machines flatline.

The room was deathly silent, the only noise the soft beep of the machines and the elderly woman's slow intakes of breath. The family had been here since last early afternoon, when they received news that grandma Franklin had been found collapsed, on her kitchen floor. It turns out that she had a minor but sudden stroke and that while it wasn't technically a lethal one, the stress it put on her body and her advanced age had shortened greatly shortened her time.

Within her death-like sleep, Franklin dreamed half-dreams, of memories long since passed and forgotten. She dreamed of swing dances, of times where as a young teenager, where she had danced the night away. She dreamed of the hard times and the War and all of those fine soldiers that had died in Vietnam. She dreamed of the man on the moon and how she was proud to be an American. And she dreamed of her man, of Henry, and all those years of happiness she had with him before his years of smoking did him in. She dreamed of her childhood, of happiness and sadness, of war and scientific achievement, and of life and its end.

Far below, in the hospitals front entrance, a tall figure, clad in a ragged brown cloak, came through the sliding doors. It silently passed through the doors, which appeared to the outsider to open of their own accord, and walked into the lobby. It went up to the registry and checked through the list of occupied rooms and who occupied them.

Finding the room number it needed, the figure crossed through the hospital's right wing to the closest elevator unnoticed, and stealthy entered a open elevator, which was occupied by three other people, a nurse, a doctor, and a mute gentlemen in a wheelchair. Neither the doctor nor the nurse noticed the figure as it entered the elevator or as it went up to the 5th floor, Franklin's floor. The mute man, however, did, and as the figure politely stood with in the elevator, he gasped in fright and tried and failed to alert either health-care employee's of the figures appearance, which was happily oblivious of the man's alarm.

Eventually, the elevator came to the figure's floor, and stepping out of the elevator, it slowly but surely advanced to Franklin's infirm door. On the way there, it crossed a mirror, which surprisingly enough actually showed its reflection. It paused for a moment, to check itself in the mirror. It wasn't vain or anything, it just wanted to look good for its "client." Appearances, as much as it hated to admit, were important to the dying and deceased souls.

"Ah, I'm genderless again," it thought bitterly. "Lucky me."

Coming to Franklin's room, it raised an emaciated hand towards the door hand only to pause, if only for a moment, to look through the door's window and saw Franklin's family in the room, who had all slide into Hypnos' realm. If it disturbed them from their slumber, they might notice something amiss and halt it in its duties. The figure sighed tiredly, and with some hesitation, entered the room through the door. Without opening the door first, that is.

Hanging over Franklin, it turned its weary head towards the machines that were keeping Franklin alive. Soon, it thought, those will hardly be necessary.

Without looking back at Franklin, it began to search through the mess that was its robe in search of something, and pulled out a small, dog-eared notebook, and searched through it with the intensity of a life-long reader. It soon came to the appropriate place in the notebook and finding the name in it, found out the exact date and time for it's "client's appointment." The page read "3:45:00 PM. May 21, 2009. Old Age with complications due to stroke."

Turning its head to the clock in the room, which read 3:44:46 PM, it readied itself for the time. And, at exactly 3:45:00, Franklin Rosa Harper, died. The machines went flatline, the tense air of the room was released, and the former Franklin Harper's family woke up and began to cry over their mother/mother-in-law/grandmother's death.

With the efficiency of a professional, the figure suddenly reached out its bony hand and plucked Franklin's soul from her former body.

"Wow. That was fast. You pulled me right out of there, no doubt about that. You're a professional at this, aren't yah?" said the soul of Franklin Harper , as she looked on with the sudden shock of death. She wasn't frightened or anything. She had just died. There was no need to be shocked anymore after that life-changing event.

"Yes, I am. If you do the same job for same 45 trillion years, you eventually learn to do it off-hand," said the figure.

"You know, I had expected you to be taller. Why aren't you taller?" asked Franklin

Immediately, the figure grew 2 feet taller, not only as if it had not only just grown several feet in height, but as if it had always been that tall in the beginning.

"Well, now I am," said brown cloaked figure, as Franklin's family wept over her corpse. Her daughter was even hugging onto her dead body as if she would never let go.

"And I expected you to have red eyes. Can you change your eyes to red?" said Franklin, who never in her life had been one to settle for anything less than she wanted. Also, if she focused on this figure here, then she wouldn't have to look onto the tragic scene occurring right beside them; strong as Franklin had been during life, she didn't know if she had to strength to see her family in pain like that and not be able to help them anymore.

The figure's pale green eyes suddenly turned fire hydrant red and burned as if they were the very pits of hell themselves.

"Please stop doing that. I really hate it when people start changing my current form with their opinions. They give me a terrible headache," moaned the figure, who had started to clutch at its head in pain.

"Oh, sorry. Didn't know that," apologized Franklin. An awkward silence followed.

This silence lasted for some time, before Franklin finally said, "You know, I expected death to be a lot of things, but somehow awkward wasn't one of them. Aren't I supposed to go somewhere by now? Unless, of course, those damn atheists were right and we have nothing to look forward to is oblivion, but somehow, since you are here, I'm guessing that's not true."

The figure's head slightly wobbled, which may have been a nod as in yes or a shake for no.

"Perhaps," it said quizzically, with a small smile on its face. "And yes, you are going somewhere soon. But first, you have something to do first."

Franklin frowned. "Eh? What's that?" she asked.

The figure bent down to Franklin's eye level and gave her one of the warmest, friendliest, knowing smiles that she had ever seen. It was only second to her husband smiles, of Henry's smile. Oh, Henry.

"Simply take my hand," it said kindly, amiably holding out its bony, cold and clammy-looking right hand.

Withonly a second of hesitation, Franklin took Death by the hand, which surprisingly enough wasn't cold or clammy at all but had perhaps the warmest, softest grip in the world, and as light suddenly engulfed her, Franklin's vision was wavered for a moment and soon Death's smile suddenly became Henry's smile.

"Henry," Franklin said to her dead husband. "Why, Henry! You look like you haven't aged a day!"

It was true. Henry, who had died at the ripe age of 64, looked as if he was not a day over 25. He was even dressed in the tuxedo that he had worn when the two had married all those years ago.

Henry chuckled kindly. "Yeah, death has a way of doing that to a body," he said, shaking his brown-haired head.

"Oh, posh! And look at me! A old woman, with a strapping 25-year-old man! If only our parents could see us now! Ha!" said Franklin, her voice quivering ever so sadly.

"What are you talking about?" asked Henry, a grin on his face. Pulling a hand-held mirror out of his breast-pocket, he said, "Here take a look. You're gorgeous."

"Oh, don't you even start with me on that ,Henry Harper. We both that I'm an ugly old bag of bones, so there's no point in den...denyin...," fumbled Franklin, as she finally looked into the mirror at her reflection.

In the mirror's reflection, as if it had never changed at all, was the face of the 19-year-old woman that Franklin had thought she had lost all those years ago. Also, she was wearing the veil and dress that she had worn she married Henry.

"How did-" she started, when Henry put a finger on her lips.

"Don't even question it. Else, you'll go back to the way you were," he said pleasantly.

"Um, okay," said Franklin, before she managed to gather her senses.

"Well, if I'm going to wear the same dress for the rest of eternity, I won't want to be wearing something as unwieldy as this now, will I?" said Franklin with a huff. The wedding gown instantly disappeared and was replaced with a far less elegant but practical and still attractive, a traditional-version of a 1940s motor scooter's jacket, pants, cap and scarf (A/N: If this type of outfit has a proper name, please tell me! I really dislike not being able to give the proper name for this outfit, you know?)

Frowning slightly, Henry said, "Well, you always did have your own fashion sense."

"Damn straight," agreed Franklin firmly, as immovable and as stubborn as a rock.

"Well, shall we go then?" said Henry graciously, with a sweep of his arm into the infinite light. Franklin's mouth turned a bit, as if in hesiation, but when she said her answer, there was no trace of doubt, no inklingly of uncertianty.

"Yes. Yes, now and for always."

And so, taking Henry by the hand, Franklin went into the light.


As Death walked outside the hospital, a cheerful yet laid-back on its face, it checked its notebook again, for the next "client." Already, it could feel its shape slowly changing to suit the client's image of death and what it meant to them. It could even tell that its gender was changing from genderless to the gender more…traditional, for its personification.

Scrolling its finger down the page, it finally found the name of its next client and the reason for her death. Here's a hint: her first name starts with an "F" and her last name end with a "Z."


So, what do you think of my story so far? Like it? Hate it? Either way, I appreciate the reviews, which encourage me to write more of the story faster. And we all know how we want encouragement on this site, don't we?

I've been mulling the idea of this story for weeks now and I finally decided to do something about it. I hope that I'll do the story I've laid out in my head as must justice as the story I'm going to be typing up on my computer.

Please review!