Author's Note: This looks to be a long and promising Sands-fic, filled with almost everything Sands you can think of. Just keep in mind that this is the prologue, chapter 1 doesn't actually happen until the third insertion here. Hope that clears up any future confusion.
Disclaimer: Sands does not belong to me. Neither does 'Wandering Stars.' That, my friends, belongs to the wonderful and talented Portishead. It would be rather nice to have Sands, though…but I guess that's not happening.
'Please could you stay a while to share my grief
It's such a lovely day to have to always feel this way
And the time that I will suffer less
Is when I never have to wake.
Wandering stars, for whom it is reserved
The blackness, the darkness forever.'
-Portishead, 'Wandering Stars'
Wandering Stars
Chapter 1 - Spanish and Dying
Eyes of crimson
Crying tears of pain
Blood and betrayal
An un-fair game.
Wish upon a star
Don't even know it's there
You'll get your revenge
But you don't know where.
Empty in agony
Fire to touch
How can so much nothing
Hurt so much?
Can't sleep or dream
No eyes to close
Can only go out
From fatigue at the most.
Tired of nothing
Wants it all back
Won't calm down
Can't relax.
These visions of pain
Are all that you have
But at least no more nothing
That's all to ask.
Someone stands near him, keeping their distance. No one just casually walks up to the guy with empty eye sockets that are spouting blood like a fountain anymore. He's speaking Spanish, more god damn Spanish. The language burned Sands' ears now, leaving them as empty and painless as the place his eyes once made their home.
"Go th'fuck away..." Sands slurred, trying to sound threatening when really he just sounded drunk, having had enough. He sat, leaning heavily against a rough wall, freezing in the scorching Mexican sun. He didn't want to hear anymore of this godforsaken language. Better yet, he didn't want to hear anything at all. Since he could only depend on his ears (and a kid that made a living selling fucking bubblegum, the kid that had the nerve to tell Sands he only offered one dollar while his life was rapidly bleeding away down his face), which were working overtime to make up for his lost eyes. He was angry and frustrated and drugged and cold.
He was cold. Who the fuck was ever cold in Mexico? Who ever got cold in a country known for it's excessive amounts of heat, sand and sweat? And tequila, quite possibly god's greatest gift to man, that is if there was a god. If god truly existed, he would put a bottle of the stuff in Sands hand, and he would have drank it all. No doubt it would warm him up. He felt like he was back in Alaska. That was the first place the CIA sent him, but they just couldn't have him staying in the States, no matter how far away from civilization he was. Fucking dogsleds.
No one ever got cold in Mexico, Sands recalled, except for the gunfighters, the loser getting shot down and left in the dusty streets feeling as if they were dying from hypothermia instead of bullets and blood loss. And that was exactly how he was going to go down. This had to be teh most sense he had ever made, but he knew he would die. No eyes, three bullets and a body pumped full of god knows what kind of drugs the cartel had. The leader was, after all, a drug lord. At the thought of death and dying, life slipping away faster than anyone can hope to chase after it, Sands' mind drifted to the past, remembering an old childhood rhyme of his.
'I hope you die young
I hope you die in pain
I hope you die alone
In the pouring rain'
He found himself murmuring these lines under his breath. It was almost as if these lines were tattooed on his brain, he couldn't possibly forget them. Not even when he himself was dying. Especially not when he was dying. As much of his anthem as it was, Sands could never bring himself to forge it.
The wall was moving beneath him, trembling, and Sands wondered if it was the wall or his own body that shook. He would have shook his head, had it not felt as if it were filled with lead even after a rather hefty load had been removed from it. The CIA agent - soon to be ex CIA - felt a hand come down to rest on his shoulder; one of his flowery curses caught in the back of his throat as he jerked back with a force that sent him falling, landing like a dead weight on the curb. And now he felt the pain in his head.
Pain inside his head, as if only a minute separated the present from when his eyes had been torn out with the inhuman grace of a clumsy and enraged gorilla with a fetish for eyeballs, Sands suddenly became aware that there was an inferno raging inside his skull. Felt like that sadistic little fucker that called himself a doctor had planted eye-sized bombs in his own 2 ominously grotesque, gaping holes in the middle of his face. And now they had just exploded, along with the blind man's patience and sanity.