Sands cornered Lorenzo on his way back from the breakfast run the next morning, waiting stretched against the wall in the stairwell, senses reaching for the right set of feet.

"You're going to rent us a car," he said, when the rustling bags stopped beside him. "El's good enough to drive now, and we're getting out." His little chat with Foreman had been more than long enough to triangulate on. She'd have it down to within five or ten city blocks.

"Screw the money-lending," the kid said with a quick grin. "He can rent his own car, but I'll drive him out to the office."

"Then anyone who gets a lead on our IDs can follow us right to the airport and onto the plane," Sands said, flat. "I don't want anybody looking for us leaving, at least not for a while, and you don't want them knowing where we went either."

"Yeah, I gotcha." The kid was serious himself now, the humour gone. "I'll take Fideo, pick one up later this morning when he's awake."

The single most predictable thing about the kid; he'd always protect El.

Sands tipped his head, smiled slightly beneath the glasses. "I thought you'd make more of a fuss about him running out on you."

"Figured it was coming." Lorenzo spoke neutral and unruffled. "He'd have vanished right after if he'd been able to." He walked on up the stairs past Sands, rattling plastic at him deliberately. "Get your ass inside. I don't know about you, but I wanna eat while it's hot."

Sands turned his head to track him, let him get a few steps ahead before he straightened to follow.

He liked that flash of the practical that escaped sometimes from under all the kid's attitude. If it showed up more often, he might actually be useful.

Breakfast was just the three of them, like most days. The sound of a shower came mid-morning, after Fideo had slept off last night's liquor, and he eventually oozed through the connecting door as close to sober as he would ever get.

The kid must have been thinking on the same lines, didn't even give the dipso the chance to flop into a chair. "Hey, if you're finally up, grab yourself a coffee and let's get on. I'm gonna go rent a car for El, I need you to bring the Nissan back."

"Hey yourself, Lori, give a guy a chance to wake up, won't you?" Fideo protested, instant and inevitable.

El shifted alongside Sands, head turning his way. "Time to go?"

Sands could almost hear Lorenzo lock rigid across the room.

"He didn't bother to fill you in on that part, huh?" The kid's words were thick with the suspicion that had been mostly absent the last few weeks. It really didn't take so much to bring it back.

"Sands knows when we need to move on," El said simply. "My own history with those choices isn't so good."

"You let him decide, every time, and you just follow along?" the brat demanded, high and sharp.

El only shrugged. "I have no home now. It doesn't matter so much where we go, when we go."

"Doesn't matter a thing, so long as you let us know where we can reach you when you get there, right, El?" Fideo asked cheerfully.

"Right," El said, smiling soft.

The kid actually stayed quiet that time and let the drunk's assessment hold.

The sidekicks headed out some thirty minutes later, turning up again around noon with a mid-sized Chrysler. It still smelled new inside, all thick plastic and cleaner. It probably screamed 'rental' from three blocks distant, but it was all they were going to get outside of having the kid lift another vehicle, and Sands didn't want to leave a stolen ride at the airport either.

There wasn't much to pack. They were still living the El Mariachi Mexico lifestyle, and pretty much the only things not in bags already were the clothes they were wearing.

El wasn't in an ideal state to be hauling luggage around yet, however much he might have protested it, and Fideo had settled in with his delayed morning bottle, so it was easy enough for Sands to arrange to be loading bags into the trunk alongside the kid. And from there to take him by the arm and steer him into the alleyway by the trash out back.

"What's going on?" The kid was asking questions, but he hadn't resisted the walk. A few weeks back he would have screeched the length of the street if Sands had tried to drag him off somewhere.

Sands reached into his pocket and held out a piece of paper he'd printed off from the laptop earlier. "This is a name and an address. You call the number before you go, and you tell him Stamford sent you. You do as the nice man says, and he'll get passports for you and the dipso, and then you leave. You do not go back to your place in Acapulco, or his, or anywhere else in this pox-pitted country. Got it?"

"What the fuck are you on about?" Lorenzo was confused, but he wasn't pissed about Sands handing out orders. Not yet anyways. "We're good here, we fixed everything."

"You haven't fixed a goddamn thing," Sands told him, flat. "You're screwed, both of you, you just haven't admitted it yet. Somebody already worked it out, connected the cookie crumb trail from you to him." He quirked his lip at one edge. "Do you think that's going to go away, the rumour that just lies down and dies peacefully one day like a convenient old grandma?"

"Who's gonna tell it?" Lorenzo said with a snort. "We killed the bastards."

"That approach never worked out so well for El," Sands reminded him. "And actually it went worse, for you. The only car we planned to leave on site was the one you lifted that morning, but you ended up ditching the Chevy in the killing fields too. All those weeks of driving it around - can you be sure you didn't leave any prints on it?"

"Who the fuck cares? The cops got no prints of mine, or Fideo's." The brat's trademark arrogance was swelling up to the high tide mark.

"Well, they do now, and right alongside some nice full sets of El Mariachi's." Sands let the first layer of smile slide over his face. "It really wouldn't be a good idea for you to be picked up and questioned about an unpaid parking ticket, not any more."

"So you're saying we gotta be careful." Some of the attitude was peeling away into resignation. "Okay, we can lay low a while, no problem."

The kid still wasn't bothering to read ahead. He had a set of wilful blinkers big enough for the goddamn Trojan horse.

Well, Sands was more than happy to enlighten him. "I'm telling you to take him" – gesturing up and back in the direction of the hotel room – "and get your asses the fuck out of this country and don't come back. I can recommend Caracas, though personally I don't give a fuck where you go, just as long as it's nowhere near me." His smile crept wider, and harder, thin curve of lip drawn across a face held deliberately flat. "And if you want to stay healthy, make sure you don't go calling El either."

"Fuck you!" Sands had that angle nicely covered, but he had to admire the kid's attitude, just a little. Most of the people who weren't too scared to get up in his face were just too stupid to see. "You can't threaten me, and you know it. You lay a finger on me, or Fideo, and El's gonna dropkick your ass hard off of the nearest cliff."

Sands didn't doubt it. El Mariachi had created himself as a mechanism for revenge, and he was good at it - there were tripwires in him Sands didn't ever plan to touch on. But the best part was that he never had to.

He stretched his lips slow, all the teeth in the tone instead of the smile. "I don't have to do a thing. It's amazing how rumours can get around, how the right words can go skipping along a predictable trail until they find themselves in the right ears. A passing comment made to one particular guy out of a thousand, and suddenly you find it's everywhere."

"I could do the same favour for you," Lorenzo snapped.

"But you won't." Sands said, relaxed and entirely confident. "Because anybody who comes to find me finds him too."

"And you're in deep enough you won't risk him finding out you set us up." The bite ran deep and satisfied through the kid's words. "So I guess we've got ourselves a stalemate."

The kid took a while to get going, but once his nose was pointed the right way, he could add a few things up on his own. Sands had figured as much if El considered him worth the time. "A genuine Mexican stand-off," he agreed. "But there's a little extra something you might want to take into consideration." He lowered his voice, speaking soft through his smile, still tacked wide. "If you suck him into any more of your ten cent troubles and get him killed, I can promise it won't come quick or easy for you."

He'd expected the threat to bring him more of the kid's whiplash self-righteous fury, but instead he got pure stillness. Stillness and words that came slow, thickened with curiosity. "And you think that means you get to start laying down orders on us, huh?"

"Think of it more as some strongly-felt advice. Telling you to get out of Mexico, that's for your own health." Sands smiled wide and bright beneath tilted eyebrows. "The El part, well, that's all about your health too."

"We're supposed to just up and leave our homes and our country because you say so?"

This conversation wasn't actually getting Sands anywhere, the brat tossing back the same protest every time, wrapped up in new packaging. The stubbornness the kid had obviously learned from El - pity he hadn't picked up on the sense too.

Time to change tack a little, before the stench of rotting food trapped in this alleyway finally made him gag. "Have you noticed anything about El during this little sojourn? Would you say he seems, maybe, a bit more relaxed than the last time you saw him?"

"Last time we saw him, he'd been drugged, kidnapped and gotten the shit kicked out of him because of some old friends of yours."

Well, that part was kind of hard to deny. Sands shrugged. "So go back further, the time before. I'll leave you to decide if any changes are down to the influence of my personal charm, or just getting clear of this piss-pot you live in."

"It works for El," Lorenzo admitted. His tone hardened again. "Doesn't mean it would work for us."

"But you'll do it anyway," Sands said flat, entirely confident now that he'd steered them onto a path the kid couldn't just argue away. "There are just too many good reasons to give a vacation a try out, and not enough good ones to stay."

The kid was eyeing him again through the pause, almost thoughtful. "And if we do, if we go, like you say, what are you getting out of it? You don't give a fuck what happens to us."

"With you gone, there's no reason left for El to ever want to come back to this putrid goat's colon of a country where everybody wants us dead," Sands said simply. It never did any harm to give an extra little push on those El-protective instincts the kid clung to so fiercely.

Movement, fast, and too close, movement flashing his way, but the kid was no threat to him, and Sands held himself still and almost casual as the paper was snatched from his hand. "We'll think about it," the kid said, brushing past Sands to head out of the alley in long, even strides.

Sands aimed a crooked smile at his back. "Are you going to go trotting off now and tell El all about this little chat?"

The kid paused, swivelled on his heel. "Why would I? You'd only deny it," he said in disgust.

Sands raised an eyebrow at him. "What would be the point in that?"

"You'd twist it all around so he wouldn't know whose take was real."

The kid said it like it was so very obvious, and Sands didn't bother to hold back the laugh. "He really won't appreciate you treating him like an idiot."

The kid paused before he answered, suspicion thick in his voice. "You're saying he doesn't trust you."

"He trusts me," Sands said easily. "He also knows me. Apparently the two aren't mutually exclusive."

"You really don't care if I tell him what a fuckcase you are."

Sands shrugged. "You're the only one who'd learn anything from it. He knows who I am - it hasn't made a difference by now, and it isn't going to."

"You saying he knew you'd pull this shit when he brought you?" Most of the anger flash had fizzled out of the kid now, and what was left was raw curiosity.

"Somehow I doubt he gave it any thought, occupied as he was with feeling guilty. But he won't be surprised when you fill him in."

"Then I guess there's still no point in me bothering, huh?" The kid took a few steps back towards the car, then stopped, turning to face Sands again. "You knew it was pointless, all of it, the whole time. So why the fuck did you play along instead of just saying it?"

Sands aimed him a bright flash of teeth. "Because it wasn't pointless, of course." He dialled it back to a quirk at the corner and raised his eyebrows. "Oh, it was pointless for you, tossing and twisting on the end of the line, desperately trying to get away from the inevitable, to get back to your nice house and cosy little lifestyle." He leaned in a touch closer, the extra emphasis for his words. "But El's repaid the debt now, gotten that last niggling obligation out of his system. So the next time you might call him up and recite some pathetic tale of woe, it shouldn't be too hard to persuade him he can protect you better by staying away."

That got him the quick, light feet and Lorenzo spitting right up in his face again. "You little fuck, you think you can piss with his head and keep him away from us?"

Sands stayed relaxed, unfazed, holding that faint tail of a smile. "It's what he thinks anyway, you accused him of it yourself. I'm just going to encourage it a little, that's all."

"And you'd do all this, fix the whole thing, send El out to get shot at, just so's you could get an angle on him."

Sands spent considerable time and effort on cultivating an image, and it was always good to know the image held, but the kid had been in the picture long enough that he really ought to know better. "El would have done what he did whether I signed off on it or not. It's easier to play along when it happens to get us both what we want."

"And what about when it doesn't?" Lorenzo asked, quiet now, all the aggression sucked back. "Have you even figured out which one of you's gonna get screwed the hardest when you decide you want different things?"

The kid turned again, heading back out of the alley towards the car, and this time Sands had no intention of stopping him.

It was an interesting final shot the kid had chosen to leave him with. The brat might actually have managed to learn a few things from him over the last months. Though he still had a hell of a long way to go if he thought anything he said was going to rattle Sands, instead of just amusing him.

Sands waited just a few more moments before he started walking to follow the kid back inside, only too happy to leave the alley alone with its trash.

The kid didn't say anything more to Sands as they loaded the last of the bags, and he joined in the routine mariachi chatter brightly enough back in the room. He tagged along when they went out to the car, El walking almost normal now, just something barely slow in the rhythm of his boots in Sands' head.

The dipso stayed inside, too soaked already to leave the armchair.

Sands settled into the passenger seat, into shaped foam curling up alongside his thighs, stretching his back along the curve of the rest. The car dipped and twitched as El slid in alongside him, the door closing with a low thunk. Soft whirr of a motor as El's window rolled down, and Sands was still feeling the panels for the controls to his own, the car hot and airless from the noon sun.

The kid leaned in, propping an elbow on the driver's sill. "Hey, El. You do know what you're doin', right?"

"Don't I always?" El smiled.

"No, you don't, you goddamn nut-job, look at the image you went and landed yourself with." The kid was rolling his eyes again. "That could do with a major fucking overhaul."

"I know what I'm doing." This time El's tone was taking the kid and question seriously. "Are you happy now?"

"As I'm ever gonna be, I guess." The kid backed off a little, straightening. "Take care of yourself, okay?"

He offered no aspirations for Sands' welfare, or any acknowledgement of his existence at all, but that suited Sands just fine.

"I will." El started the engine in a fine healthy purr of new mechanicals that Sands hadn't experienced in a while, and then they were moving away into the growing traffic growl.

The breeze from the window circled through the car, tugging strands of hair to tickle light along his cheek and chin. It brought with it the stench of fumes and dirt and pollution, the rumble and chatter of a city with too many people going about their mundane and pointless little lives, and Sands sucked it all in, let it dissolve into white noise through his head, because he was getting out and he wasn't ever coming back.

He was getting out of goddamn bitch-fucking Mexico. And this time he was doing it before the cunt-licker shoved him face down in the dirt to eat her dust.

El's hands moved over the wheel, fingers reaching to flick the turn signals, a constant low background of shifting sound alongside.

They were out, and they were getting the hell away, but Sands didn't believe for a second that his warnings would keep the brat from poking at El again. And he wanted to know what El's reaction was going to be. Oh, Sands would set his plans in place, responses styled to work around the various contingencies, but a little advance warning was never unwelcome.

El had said the sidekicks wouldn't be there when he died, and implied that Sands would be, and that seemed a reasonably flat statement of intent right there. But El had been known to change his mind a whole lot of times about a whole lot of things, Sands himself notably included. If Sands didn't know the details of exactly why El stayed around, he wasn't in any position to make sure those reasons didn't wander off along the way.

He waited till El had navigated his way through the Mexico maze, waited till the traffic moved thick in lanes either side, the arterial headed around the city taking them right to the airport. He really wouldn't want to get lost and miss the day's flights.

He reached inside his jacket for the pack of smokes in his pocket, slid a thumbnail under the edge of plastic wrapper. "So tell me, El, what is it you want?"

El's head swung his way, slow and curious. "How do you mean?"

"Well, if a guy's gonna go after what he wants, he's got to know what that is." The best way to get an answer from El was to keep it simple, impossible to misinterpret. "So what do you want now? Really want?"

There was an instant before he answered when El stilled, breathless, and Sands already suspected the question was a mistake. "Someone asked me that once before." The words came flat and empty. "I answered 'freedom'. I found out later that answer was wrong."

That someone just had to have been the wife. Everything always came back to her with the Mariachi. Oh, well, he'd already trailed his footprints all through the wet cement; no reason not to get his answers now or he'd just turned El all moody on him for nothing.

Sands shook a cigarette from the pack for himself, offered the rest in El's direction. "So what's the right answer?"

El shrugged, ignoring the carton. "There isn't one. What I wanted is gone, and now I don't want what I should."

Sands slid the pack back away into his pocket. "I didn't ask what you should want, I asked what you do."

He didn't get why El had to make a big, protracted drama out of it. Christ, it couldn't be that fucking hard. Sands would have had his answer inside a nanosecond, the one thing he wanted from his future more than anything.

He didn't want to be tied down and tortured. He didn't want anybody slicing into any part of him, or scraping anything out of him, not unless it was in a hospital under full anaesthetic, and preferably not even then. And he wanted his teeth to last him too, because he wasn't sure he could ever sit in a dentist's waiting room and listen to that sound through the walls and make himself walk towards it. More likely he'd be groping and stumbling his way past the door jamb to heave his stomach into the gutter.

If he had to couch it in terms of what he wanted instead of what he didn't, he wanted to win. Every single round, not just the long game.

Maybe that's what El wanted too. He'd fucked up and Carolina and the kid had died - maybe El needed to win.

It could explain why he'd stayed with Sands. The brat hadn't swallowed that El being miserably lonely was enough to swing it, and well, he was probably a better judge of the impact of that kind of emotional wallowing than Sands. It would cover a whole chunk of it - an appreciation of how their areas of skill intersected and complemented, El's smooth, purely instinctual method of assessing, of fighting, and his own slower, cooler, more logical application of triggers and consequences.

Sands drew smoke into his body, deep and drowsy, let it trickle cooling between his lips while he waited for his answer.

El flicked the turn signal, a soft clicking behind the engine's purr through the change of lane. "I don't want anything." There was no maudlin self-pity in it, just a statement flat and bare.

'I don't want anything I don't already have.'

That was the same crock of camel shit El had dined out on while he'd been hiding away in guilt-fuelled hermit mode, and it was even less helpful to Sands now. It was kind of tricky to offer a man what he wanted when the guy himself didn't seem to have the first fucking clue.

On the other hand, if El couldn't manage to rustle himself up a goal worth pursuing, well, he wasn't going to go wandering off to chase it, was he?

It was still there in Sands' head, the sentence he'd laid down earlier, confident and natural. It hasn't made a difference by now, and it isn't going to.

He hadn't just been feeding out a line to the kid, he'd believed it.

Sands had a number of different reasons why he trusted El not to kill him, why he trusted the man to watch his back and stop him screwing up if he ever looked like he was losing it. Solid reasons based on fact, on logical assessment and precedent. It pissed him off that he didn't have any concrete reasons to trust El not to ditch him, but it didn't change the fact that he did.

Maybe assuming wasn't so bad a thing, not so long as he was right.

Sands rolled his cigarette between thumb and forefinger, and tossed it out through the strip of window half-smoked. The whistle of air droned past his ear, monotonous, unchanging.

El was almost still beside him, as still as he ever was, pushing into Sands' awareness as breath and presence and the soft skim of hands over the wheel.

Sands stretched his feet further into the footwell, wriggled his ass down into the seat. Resisted the urge to turn and study with more than peripheral senses, to watch with eyes he didn't have.

Even if he was right, assuming it just wasn't very satisfying.

He found himself wondering absently what the brat's take on El's attachment to Sands would have been. Though the kid's verdicts had already shown themselves to be laughably unsound, and El's own angle on it would be much more interesting to tease out. It was one way to enliven a dull drive.

The subtle plays didn't work too well with El, and most of the time it wasn't because he didn't see them, he just chose to ignore them. The easiest way for Sands to get his answers was to trap him with bluntness - that way, if El wanted to be evasive he still would, but at least he had to be obvious about it.

Sands turned now to face El, twisting in his seat to hold himself there without cramping up his neck, still and silent and entirely focussed.

He weighed the pause, shaped the words out careful with suitable dramatic weight. "You know, the kid thinks I actually love you." He let his fingers roll slow over the denim stretched tight across his thigh. "I've been wondering if he might be right."

El flicked his head briefly Sands' way. "Good." His amusement burned through the word.

"Good?" Sands would have expected pretty much any reaction but that one. It really didn't seem to follow on too well from what should have been a heart-felt, life-in-hands kind of statement. "That's it?"

El shrugged, the standard quick rustle. "If you need to think about it, that's close enough. It doesn't matter so much if you decide in the end you do or you don't."

Sands stilled his fingers in his lap, stretched his lips into a taut line of smile. "For a guy who thinks it's such a good thing, it's noticeable how you're in no hurry to reciprocate."

"It's not what I felt for Carolina, but that doesn't matter either." El's words were quieter this time, no trace of his humour left, but they still flowed simple, instant, with no space for thought.

Sands tipped his head, curious, and decided to keep right on pressing. It wouldn't be any fun at all to stop now. "What if I think it does?"

El's head jerked back his way, fast. "Do you want me to cuddle with you on the sofa, call you 'darling'? You told me once that you weren't my wife, and that still seems to be true."

The brush of anger and bitterness through it was interesting – El didn't get annoyed by questions he didn't like, only those that really poked at a nerve, that he couldn't or wouldn't answer.

"El, if you didn't have that part soaked right the way through your skull, I wouldn't have stuck around too long."

"I know." This time it really did seem like the end of the conversation, but Sands could live with that. It wasn't the first thing El had refused to tell him, and that was just El.

He hadn't expected anything from the answer anyway – it would take a particularly self-deluding kind of idiot to fall for a sociopath, and for all his romantic streak, El wasn't, on the whole, an idiot. Sands could entertain himself by keeping right on guessing.

Except El's attention wasn't back on the road. His breathing was a little too deep and deliberate to be natural, and the edge of it warmed the air faint at Sands' ear, El's head still half-turned his way as he watched him.

Sands could be patient enough when he needed to, and he could out-wait El any day. He wriggled himself a little deeper into the curves of his seat, dropped his head back to lean against the rest, his own breath flowing light and even.

He was beginning to wish he'd closed his window before he started this. The December breeze sweeping past his neck was getting chilly at this speed, even if it did stop him choking on the new car plastic and polish.

El turned his head away, eyes locked straight onto the road before he spoke. "I'll do anything that's needed to keep you here. That wouldn't be any different if I was in love with you."

Sands held his posture draped back into the seat, but his fingers curled tight to bite through the denim into his thigh.

From an obsessive like El, that was pretty much the heaviest statement on the shelf, and it came without even a high school diploma in the way of qualification.

So that's what El wanted over everything - he didn't want anybody else dying at his feet. It slotted in nicely alongside the whole guilt thing he'd spouted for Little Lori that first night in Acapulco.

It also brought along a whole other set of issues.

Sands had known for more than a year now that he'd hauled himself into the top few spots on El's priority list, and it might have been nice to have it confirmed he was standing on the peak so he could relax and take in the view. But it wasn't, not with that line.

In a twisted kind of a way, El had just handed Sands responsibility for his life. It wasn't something he wanted, not beyond the standard making sure no dip-fucker got close enough to shoot either one of them anyway. Not to mention, there was something faintly unwelcome about the wording - that 'keep you here' instead of a maybe more understandable 'keep you alive'.

If Sands ever decided he was bored with El's company, he was gone, and the mariachi didn't get a fucking say.

Admittedly, it was looking unlikely he'd be making that call in any future he could see coming.

The aim of this whole play had been to make damn sure El never got any thoughts about heading off without him. Sands hadn't weighed in the possibility that there might be such a thing as it working too well. He probably should have, knowing his own talent for it, and dealing with a guy whose tendencies leaned just a teensy bit off to the obsessive side of normal.

Right now, it fitted in with Sands' own plans too well for him to get overly pissed about it. And Sands didn't have any aspirations to drop dead at anybody's feet either, so hey, that part worked for him too.

It was looking more and more like this arrangement was set till one of them finally took that inevitable bullet to the brain - or possibly both of them, since Sands wasn't entirely illusionary about his own chances of dealing with someone who could get through El. Clearing out of Mexico didn't change the ending, only delayed it.

But for now, the delay seemed to be working out nicely.

The car hummed low, wind around his ears and pavement under the wheels washing over the steady note of the engine. Sands reached forward to the centre console, finding and fiddling with the radio controls, skimming through stations till he found one that played something more like classic rock than classic Mexican. He settled back into his seat, fingers tapping soft and lazy over his thigh. The traffic was getting heavier this close to the airport, and he left the window open as the car slowed.

El's fingers were moving too, rhythmic on the plastic of the steering wheel, a low hum on his breath following the music, then taking it and twisting around it, adding layers under the melody. When Sands was working on a problem, that kind of shit pissed him off, but right now he was happy to lose his head in the swarm of sounds around him, let the time pass in a semi-doze, drifting him closer to a friendly jet and the airspace of some country that wasn't goddamn Mexico.

The car braked, almost hard, the traffic locking up around them, and the background staccato of El's fingers stopped with it. "So what time is our flight?"

Sands stirred himself in his seat, stretching deliberately and flexing his ankles. "Well, that depends. We're not going back to Bolivia. Not yet."

"Why not?" No suspicion, no protest from El, not ever, just simple curiosity. Sands could work with that.

"I feel like I could use a vacation." Sands needed El fast, flawless and unshakeable before they went near La Paz. It was a notable disadvantage to the bodyguard angle that people wouldn't always appreciate quite how much damaging El would piss Sands off. Any hint of a weakness might just encourage somebody with ambitions to have a go at taking him out - sometimes image really was everything. "Any thoughts on where you want to go?"

Sands had the right hair and should be carrying a good perma-tan by now - when they changed papers again, he might claim himself a Hispanic parent and make them cousins.

Rising notes of engines from ahead and around, and the car moved off again, slow, the hold-up brief. "I haven't seen the sea in a long time," El said softly. "Not as it should be, to stand and watch the waves."

Not since before Culiacán two years ago, for both of them. Their last coastal visits hadn't exactly been about relaxation.

Sands wasn't going to be seeing the sea either way, but he'd always liked the ocean - maybe now would be a good time to take that delayed trip to Brazil, but El didn't speak Portuguese. Belize had good beaches and a good rep, but was just a bit too friendly with the UK, and by connection the US.

"Perfect. I believe Cuba's got a nice climate this time of year." Neither of them would be stripping down much on a public beach, too many nice round bullet scars advertising exactly what they were, but he liked the scents and touch of it, foam breaking warm across his ankles, salt and seaweed heavy in the breeze over skin and sweat. A few more weeks would get El back close enough to full action, before Sands had time to tire of the inactivity.

"Can you go to Cuba?" El asked, curious.

"I can go anywhere I like," Sands answered with a smile. "It just means a little more paperwork, that's all."

"Cuba sounds good," El said. "Do we have a flight to make?"

They would have missed the day's direct flights, but Sands preferred to route his departures from Mexico through a third country anyway. And contrary to El's perceptions, he didn't carry the entire schedule for every airline in his head, just a few pertinent destinations. "Not particularly. We could go through a few different cities, stay overnight." He'd get more details on those at the airport. Anyplace that wasn't in Mexico.

The air bled past his nose, heavy with scents of gasoline and pollution and world, the car swaying and dipping beneath him, the soft sounds and movements of El a constant slide into his head. It felt like three fucking decades since it had been like this, without the Ghosts of Sidekicks Present perched in the background, waiting to intrude on a good day.

This little trip was getting pretty close to just how Sands would want it. Apart from the bit where El was scarred and stiff and healing, of course, that didn't have much of a place in Sands' plans.

Sands wasn't one of those guys whose entire pathetic existence seemed to focus on their next chance at getting laid, but he did enjoy it from time to time.

Sex for Sands hadn't often been about the sex, not since he was in high school and barely even then. It had been about access, about control, about watching and pushing and finding the easiest way to take what he wanted. And hey, that was fun in a special way all its own.

But sometimes, when the exhaustion pricked at the edges, when the rats scampered and sniffed in endlessly pattering feet through his head, sometimes it was good to drown out the press of thought in the sheer physicality of the act, and the body alongside him, and that particular take on sex was now an El exclusive.

They'd traded blow jobs a couple of times the last week, nothing energetic to strain the still-healing muscle beneath the sealed, raised scar under El's ribs. Sands wasn't generally inclined to object to getting his cock sucked, but variety was a useful herb for the soup, and something a little more flexible in all senses of the word was starting to appeal.

He still had images of Foreman flicking through his head, the round neck of a baby doll Tee curving past her collarbones and clinging over the rack up front. Alice and Sophie too, a dozen others, some names he couldn't remember, just the weight and swelling shape of a tit beneath his grip, beneath his lips. Christ, even that evil witchbitch of Barillo's was there in his head, because she'd been a seriously hot piece of cunt as well as a twisted, double-crossing sadist - and he wanted it, wanted them, because fucking El was good, but it wasn't the same sensations, and the little differences really added life's cardamoms to the curry. Not that it was ever going to happen when he was just too fucking strung-out wary to appreciate a good screw even if he didn't get a needle in the neck and –

And he wondered if El would do it.

Given their current living arrangements, it might be something of a stretch to say El was straight, but he would have lived any near-normal life without ever thinking about dicks that weren't his own. It had taken a particularly twisted combination of grief, guilt and isolation to drive him to a man, though prison would probably have worked well enough too.

El had to want it, just the same way Sands did, and he didn't have much left in the way of Catholic hang-ups, if they'd ever really gotten a hold. Hell, he'd fucked his wife the day he met her - marrying her had been the afterthought some lengthy time later.

El's instincts as a double-check on Sands' judgement, the back-up against the knife blade, the counterweight to the it's-not-paranoia-when-they-really-are-out-there – it would work that way. El seemed to make the better choices overall when it came to sweet pieces of ass, though Sands didn't need a woman who'd get herself shot full of holes for him, just one who wouldn't sit back and laugh while some fucker drilled his eyes out.

He could make it work. He could make anything work. Especially when El already wanted to be persuaded.

Sands rearranged himself angled on the seat, elbow on the door and head tipped against the rest, casually braced for the car's twitch, the slight jerk on the wheel. Waited for the lack of movement, the stillness after motion to grab at El's awareness. Waited for the curiosity, the shift of El's head his way before he let the smile creep out slow.

"So tell me, El, have you ever gotten yourself in on a three-way?"

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And that's it. THE END. I am done!