Chapter 7
Surviving
Disclaimer: I don't own Sands and El but oh, how I wish I did. They both need hugs, very badly. And I don't think Robert Rodriguez gives them that.
Rating: A very strong R for language and disturbing themes
Summary: El gets some help.
Author's Note: The warning from chapter 6 continues in full force. This is very dark stuff, guys. The inside of Sands' head is never pleasant, but especially at this particular moment in time…
****
Sands was drowning.
He couldn't see. He couldn't breathe. Voices sounded like ocean waves, indistinct roars as they washed over him. Hands pulled at him, dragging him down, holding him still, holding him down.
He could not get away.
Let me go, please, let me go.
Stay still. I'll take care of this. Let me handle it.
Yes. When that voice spoke, he listened. He obeyed. The voice protected him, when no one else did. The voice was good.
It had spoken to him not long ago. He could remember it, vaguely. It was the last thing he remembered. Let me handle it.
But why? Why? Handle what?
No no no. Don't, don't think about it. Not now, not ever, not ever again.
All right. Yes. Not thinking about things was good.
The indistinct voices were still there, but they were starting to go up in pitch, slow down a little in speed. They were becoming real voices. He could hear words every now and then through the ocean haze of sound.
They're talking about you. They don't like you.
Why?
You know why. Because you're worthless. That's all right. I'm still here. I'm the only one who's still here.
No, not true. There was someone else still there. Two someone elses. He could remember who they were, if only that voice in his head would shut up, just for a second, just please shut up, could he think?
Then one voice penetrated the haze, and all the other voices were silenced.
"Señor? Señor?" A hand touched his shoulder. Gave him a tentative shake.
No. No. He had to get away, get away now! The hand was gentle at this moment, but that was a lie. Soon it would turn harsh. Soon it would hold him down, no matter how much he cried and protested.
Consciousness, which had hovered close, so close – for how long? – suddenly snapped into place. He rolled up to a sitting position, flailing out with his arm, knocking the hand and its owner away. "Don't touch me!"
"Señor?"
He knew that voice. It broke through some of the haze surrounding him. Sands relaxed a little. "Chiclet?"
"Sí." The boy sounded relieved. He also sounded down low, as if he had been knocked to the floor. Sands winced. Shit.
He frowned, trying to remember. Why he was on the floor. Why Chiclet was here. Why the TV was on, but the volume was turned down low.
Why everything smelled like blood and gunpowder.
"Are you all right?" Chiclet asked. He sounded very anxious.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," he muttered. It was coming back to him. Real memories, not those old fractured memories, the ones he had tried so hard to forget.
The cartel. Fideo's betrayal.
There had been men. And one of them had said—
He shook his head. The memory was there, but it was distorted. It was all hazy. The last clear thing he remembered was hearing the voice in his head saying, Let me handle it.
"Are they all dead?" he asked.
"Sí," Chiclet said quietly.
"Where's El?" He suddenly realized he had no idea what had happened to the mariachi.
"Behind you," Chiclet said. "He is still unconscious." His voice caught. "There's a lot of blood."
Sands frowned. Blood? Had El been shot?
Christ, had he shot El? He suddenly had a vague memory of waving a gun at El, shouting something. But he didn't know if that was right or not. He had threatened El plenty of times in the past, but today? Had he threatened El today? He didn't know. And he could not trust his memories. They betrayed him, more often than not. It was best to stick to hard evidence.
"Lead me to him," he said. He held out his hand.
Chiclet took his hand and he stood up. The boy's hand was clammy and gross, but it was a lifeline, an anchor to reality that Sands clung to fiercely. It reminded him where he was, and who he was. He was not a scared kid in Indiana anymore. He was a scared, blind ex-CIA agent in Mexico.
His legs were unsteady beneath him. His face hurt where the cartel men had struck him, but he barely registered the pain. Right now there were more important things to focus on. "Where is he?"
"Here." Chiclet stopped walking.
He knelt down cautiously. He reached out with one hand and encountered an arm. El's arm.
"Is he shot?"
"No. They hit him."
"Where?"
"His face."
"That's where the blood is?"
"Sí."
"Are his eyes different?"
"Que?"
"Pick up his eyelids. Is one bigger than the other?"
After a pause, "No."
"Good. All right. This is what I want you to do. Go into El's room. Clear me a path. Shove all the furniture aside if you have to. Turn down the bed. Then go get me a blanket, a bowl of water, and the first-aid kit from the bathroom cabinet. Can you do all that?"
"Sí," Chiclet said in a very small voice.
"Hey, are you going to faint on me or something? You all right?"
Don't faint, Chiclet. Don't bail on me. I need you now, kid. Christ, you have no idea how much I need you.
"I'm all right," the kid said. He sounded slightly stronger now.
"Good. Now go do what I told you. And walk, don't run. I don't want you tripping and falling or something. Then I'd have to fix you up, too."
"I won't," Chiclet said. He started walking away. The list Sands had given him would keep him occupied for some time. That was good. That was what Sands wanted.
He was left alone with El.
****
He felt cold all over. Cold in Mexico. Who would have thought?
Don't think! snapped the voice in his head. That only gets you into trouble.
This was true. Too much time alone with his thoughts was never good. It was one reason he hated to stand still. He needed to keep moving, so his thoughts couldn't catch up to him.
That was why things had been so fucked up for him lately. He had been spending too much time just sitting around this house, with nothing to do but brood. When really he knew better. He needed to keep occupied, or his mind turned on itself. Old things floated to the surface, things rotten and black, things best kept buried.
Like Uncle Tommy. Good ol' Uncle Tommy, whose death had been quite sudden. The police said it looked like he had come home and apparently surprised a burglar in his house. He had been shot over a dozen times, two guns' worth of ammunition unloaded into him. Isn't it awful? everyone had said. It's such a shame. So sudden. Why, Sheldon, you were just out there visiting him for your graduation. Who knew that was the last time any of us would ever see him alive?
Who knew, indeed.
Who knew?
Why, El Mariachi. He knew.
"Oh shit," Sands said in a trembling little voice.
El knew. His darkest secret, the thing he rarely even allowed himself to think about.
El fucking knew.
Because now that his mind was his own again, he remembered. The thing the cartel man had said. The thing that had unleashed his madness.
El would have seen his reaction. And as stupid as he could sometimes be, El was not entirely lacking in intelligence. There was no way El could not know.
Such a thing could not be suffered to pass. El could not be allowed to know. Sands could not bear such a thought.
He began feeling along the floor, trying to find the gun he knew had to be nearby. It was unfortunate, but he was going to have to kill El. He could not allow the man to live with the knowledge he now had.
How could he face El again, now that the man knew? How could he go on, pretending like nothing had happened?
"Sorry," he breathed, searching faster. "Really I am."
He found El's arm again, and this time he followed it down to the mariachi's hand. There, as he had hoped, he found a gun. It was small, but it would still do the trick.
He took the gun from El's hand. He scooted forward on his knees so he could press the muzzle to the soft flesh under El's jaw.
Sticky, drying blood coated his fingers. El's blood.
A hairbreadth away from pulling the trigger, he paused.
There's a lot of blood, Chiclet had said.
He lowered the gun to the floor. Cautiously, ready to snatch his hand back at the slightest hint that El was coming awake, he touched the mariachi's face.
Chiclet had not lied. There was indeed a lot of blood. It coated El's mouth, chin, nose and forehead. Only his cheeks seemed free of it.
His eyes, too. Don't forget his eyes, said the voice in his head. Some people still have their eyes, you know.
"Shut up," he muttered.
El's features remained slack; he was not going to be waking up any time soon. Emboldened, driven by a compulsion he could not explain, Sands explored the mariachi's face.
He had only seen El twice, and once had been through the screen of the confessional booth, so that time hardly counted. That left only their first meeting, in the cantina, when he had asked El to kill Marquez. As a consequence, in his memory the mariachi was always frowning. He knew that couldn't always be true, but the image persisted. Whenever he imagined El, there was a frown on the man's face.
He felt his way along El's face. The firm jaw, the full lips, the wide nose, the plane of his cheek, the deep-set eyes. El was not bad looking, even he had to admit that. It was something of a surprise that there no eligible señoritas falling all over themselves vying for his attention.
He let his fingers trail downward. Skating over the pulse in the mariachi's throat, following the curve of El's collarbone. Down to El's left hand.
The bracer he remembered seeing there was gone. He wondered when that had happened. Curious, he traced the scar on El's palm. He knew the story behind it, how El had been mistaken for a killer, how a woman had died because of him.
He pressed his own scarred hand to El's. Palm to palm. Scar to scar.
He thought suddenly of something he had seen in a movie once. Boys in a treehouse, slicing open their palms with a piece of broken glass, holding hands tightly so their blood mingled. Now we're blood brothers, linked for life.
Or some shit like that.
He had no brothers, no sisters. He had never had a friend, before El.
One evening, a few days before dying, Ramirez had asked him about El. "What would you have done with yourself, if he had not come for you when he did?"
He had shrugged, trying to act like he had not lain awake many nights, pondering that very same question. "Well, I don't know, Jorge, but I imagine it would have involved a lot of guns and dead bodies, until I got myself killed."
Ramirez had scoffed. "You sound like you're sorry it didn't go down that way."
"There are advantages to being dead," he had said, fully aware that he was talking to a dying man.
"Such as?"
"When you're dead you don't have to worry anymore about being blind."
Ramirez had been silent for a while, then he had said, "It is good he came for you. I used to be not so sure, but not anymore."
"Yeah? What changed your mind?"
"You are good for each other."
He had opened his mouth to make some snappy retort – probably something real witty, like, "Bullshit" – but Ramirez had doubled over, coughing and groaning, and so he had let the comment pass.
But he remembered it now.
He let El's arm drop back. It hit the floor bonelessly. Sands frowned. It wasn't good that El had been unconscious for this long. It was very possible that he had a concussion.
"Come on, El. Wake up." He shook the mariachi's shoulder sharply. All CIA agents were trained in basic first-aid, and even a few steps beyond. Sands knew better than to shake El, but at the moment he could have cared less for proper procedure. "Stop farting around. Get up." He needed to know how badly hurt El was. Chiclet had said El's eyes weren't dilated, so that was a good sign, but there was no knowing for sure until El regained consciousness.
"Come on, El! Get your lazy ass up!" He slapped the mariachi.
Nothing.
Shit. Sands sat back on his heels. He didn't like this. El should have woken by now. That continued unconsciousness worried him. And he didn't like being worried.
Why the hell should you care? asked the voice. Let him sleep. He can't bother us that way.
Fair enough. But he did care. He could not deny that. He had realized that in Durango last year, while waiting for Boston to come back and torture him some more. He cared about El and what happened to him.
The problem was, he didn't know what else he wanted. One minute he was filled with scorn for El, Chiclet, their whole damn village, and all of Mexico. The next minute he felt like he belonged, like he had finally found a home.
He couldn't make up his mind. And it was that indecision, that inability to just pick one emotion and stick with it, that was making him so miserable. Ever since they had come back to Culiacan, through the long horrible summer when he had fought his madness, and on through the autumn when he had tried so hard to ignore El's steadily growing depression, he had wavered back and forth between extremes. One day he felt one thing, the next day he felt another. Nothing lasted, nothing felt permanent.
Take Christmas Eve, for example. He had truly enjoyed the chance to drive the car. He had been deeply touched that El would do that for him. For the first time in untold years, he had felt genuinely happy.
But later that night, lying awake in bed, it had occurred to him that El's laughter in the car had been directed at him. El thought it was hilarious to let the blind man drive a car. El had been mocking him, pitying him, letting him think he was in control again. El was a fucking asshole who deserved to die.
The hell of it was, even as he had lain there thinking those things, a part of him had known they weren't true.
He wanted to trust El completely. But he couldn't bring himself to take that final step. He wanted El to trust him. But he laughed at the mere idea of being trustworthy. He wanted friends. But he feared rejection.
He wanted a normal life. But he knew he would never be normal. Knowing that made him strangely sad. And the sadness pissed him off – what the hell was he thinking, wanting normalcy?
But he couldn't stop wanting it.
All in all it was terribly confusing, and Sands just didn't know what to do any more. He supposed it was just as well that he had lost the rest of his sanity tonight – he hadn't known how much longer things could go on as they were.
He was about to try slapping El awake again when the kid came back. "Señor?"
Chiclet. Thank all the gods that ever were for Chiclet. Make me sane again, Chiclet! Please! I know you won't believe it, but I was like you once.
He looked up and gave the kid a tight smile. "Did you get what I asked for?"
"Sí." Chiclet started walking toward him.
Immediately Sands held his hand up. "Shh! Stop!"
Chiclet froze.
Sands cocked his head, listening hard. Sure enough. There it was. A car was coming up the driveway.
"Fuck," he growled. More of Leon and Marco's buddies, no doubt. Come to see why the others hadn't shown up yet with the crazy, blind American spy.
"Fuck you," he whispered. He would die before going with them, before letting even one of them lay so much as a finger on him.
"Go in the kitchen," he commanded. "Now. Hide. Do not come out, no matter what you hear. Savvy?"
Chiclet swallowed hard. "Sí." He ran.
Sands grinned. "Let's get it on."
****
Staying down low, he crossed behind the piano and went to the left front window. It was open already, so he just crouched down to the left of the glass. After making sure Chiclet had truly gone into hiding, he had taken guns off two of the dead men – he couldn't be sure, but he thought one of them was Fideo.
He eased the barrel of one of the pistols over the windowsill. Not enough to poke out too far. Just enough to allow him to do what he needed to do.
The car had stopped. One door slammed, then another, then two at once. Men got out. Sands counted four sets of footsteps.
He listened as they came together in front of the car. Apparently this faction of the cartel decided things via committee meetings. They spoke in low voices; he could not make out the words.
He started to get bored. What the fuck were they taking about?
Eventually they split up, and Sands began paying attention again. Two men started for the front of the house. The other two walked around the porch, obviously intending to go in through the back door.
Sands shot the two men heading for the back of the house as they crossed in front of the window. They went down screaming. They did not get up again.
The other two men started to run. Sands shot one, and then the sounds of the fourth man disappeared. He listened hard, but he heard nothing.
"Shit." The man had frozen, gone perfectly still. He knew he was facing a blind man, and that so long as he made no noise, he was safe.
It was a stand-off. Sands did not know where the man was, and the man did not dare shoot at him for fear of revealing his location.
Slowly, keeping down, he backed away from the window. He crept over to where El was lying.
The man outside was clearly a lot smarter than his buddies. Which meant the only way he would dare enter the house was if he thought he could approach Sands without Sands knowing it. So sooner or later he was going to gather his courage. He would make his way toward the house. When no shots were fired, he would grow bolder yet, and come inside.
That was good. That was all according to plan. Sands had never yet met a man he couldn't figure out within ten seconds. This guy was no different.
He knelt beside El and felt along the floor until he found the tiny pistol. He closed El's left hand over it, first wrapping one of the mariachi's fingers about the trigger. "Okay, El. Now would be a really good time to wake up."
Nothing.
He sighed. "Fine. I just hope you know what I'm sacrificing for you. You got the last of my sanity today. Now here's the last of my dignity. Enjoy it, fuckmook."
He took El's hand in both of his and raised it to his cheek. He started rocking back and forth, keening aloud, the way he had seen some native woman doing once in a documentary on some shithole third-world country.
Hey asshole, you hear that? The crazy blind man is inside, completely off his rocker. Now come and get him!
The man outside, however, took his sweet time. Long minutes passed before Sands heard the creak of the screen door opening, and by then he wasn't sure he could sustain his charade for much longer. His throat hurt, and he felt incredibly stupid. And he was uncomfortable being so close to El, letting the man touch his face like this for so long; his skin crawled, and he wanted nothing more than to let El's hand drop back to the floor.
But at the same time, it felt oddly comforting, that touch. Like if he just turned his head a fraction, he could nestle his cheek against El's palm, and everything would be all right again.
The cartel man crept through the living room. Sands barely heard each footstep over the din of his own voice. The man was good. Very good. He suspected that anyone else would not have heard him at all.
The man stopped just behind him.
Sands counted to five, then let himself fall forward.
He had timed it perfectly. When the gun struck the back of his head, it was not the disabling strike it had been intended as, but only a glancing blow. It still hit hard, and it still hurt terribly, but he was still alive.
He continued to slump, letting the force of the blow drive him forward, as though he had been knocked out. As he fell, he let El's hand drag down, off his face, to rest atop his shoulder.
Where he now had a clear shot.
The whole time he had knelt there, he had held El's finger over the trigger of the small gun. Now he wrapped his finger around El's and together they pulled the trigger.
The bullet flew over his shoulder. Right into the cartel man's thigh. The man screamed in shock and pain, staggering backward.
Off balance now, Sands checked his forward fall with an effort. Yet he still held onto El's hand, and the gun.
He heard the pistol cock behind him. "You're dead, fucker." The barrel of the gun was pressed to the back of his head.
Sands went very still. He was still holding El's hand – with the gun – but directly in front of him now. He could not shoot, not without killing himself. This was it, then. He had played the game, and he had lost. It was not the first time he had lost, but it would be the last time.
And then the hand he was holding came to life. A quiver ran through the body on the floor in front of him. The fingers that had been limply closed about the small gun suddenly clutched it tight. The gun was shifted to the left, just a little.
When the trigger was pulled this time, it was only El's finger doing the work.
The cartel man collapsed.
The resulting silence rang in Sands' ears. In the corner, the TV droned on, a low, strangely comforting murmur of sound.
Sands knelt there for a moment. He became aware that he was rapidly losing consciousness. "Is it over?" he murmured.
Yes. It's all over. You're safe again. You can go to sleep now.
"He is dead," El said.
"Good," Sands said, and fainted.
******
Author's Note: I'm frankly terrified over what you guys will think of these chapters. I hope you don't all hate me now. I really thought long and hard about whether I should even include this in the story. But in the end I realized that unless Sands gets past this, he will never be comfortable in a slash relationship. So I decided to go ahead and write it.
Now it's time to deal with the consequences.
Which means it's time for a new warning. Those of you who don't like slash may want to skip the end of chapter 8. Those of you who like it….well, I hope you'll be happy with that chapter. More on this in the A/N to chapter 8.