Conversations in the Rain
Disclaimer: I'm unpacking all my boxes, but I still haven't come across El and Sands. I guess that means I don't own them.
Rating: PG-13 for language
Summary: El and Sands are forced to deal with each other.
Author's Note: The POV changes in this chapter from El to Sands and back again.
****
There was rain. Blurring into pain and a voice that spoke his name harshly. More pain.
He was tired, and he just wanted the pain to end.
He slid back into blackness.
****
Sands was furious. He was stuck in a shack in the middle of a storm with a man he detested. A man who was badly hurt. A man whose life he had saved, twice in one day. A man who, for some strange reason, he was trying to help.
None of it made any sense, his own actions least of all. Sitting on his ass at Ramirez's for so long had been a big mistake, he was coming to realize. He had gone soft, all right. In all kinds of ways. He was losing his edge -- and his stamina; the walk here had nearly undone him.
A bitter laugh escaped him. Of course, anyone would have a hard time walking with two brand-new holes in their leg.
But he would be all right. And so would El. The mariachi had a dislocated shoulder and some broken ribs, and his hand was all messed up, but mostly El was just suffering from the cumulative effects of a month of captivity and torment. "Don't worry," Sands chuckled, "a few days at Doctor Jorge's house and you'll be as right as rain."
Thinking of Jorge killed his laughter. He hoped the FBI agent was all right.
And then he laughed again, this time more derisively, the laughter aimed at himself. Christ, he really had gone soft, hadn't he?
He toyed with the object on his lap. It was cold in the house, and his clothes were wet and clammy. He wished it would stop raining. The moment it did, he was out of here. Gone. Hopefully never to hear the jangle of those damn mariachi pants ever again.
"Sands?"
He jumped, startled. He hadn't known El was close to waking. "What?"
"Where are we?"
A thousand smartass answers ran through his brain, but he was too tired to pick one. So he settled for the truth. "West Culiacan. If we are where I think we are, there's a house that the cartel uses sometimes to make pickups and dropoffs." He smirked. "We are actually only about a mile from Ramirez's house, as the crow flies."
"Do you think he will come looking for us?" El asked.
Sands tried to settle himself more comfortably on the couch he had claimed as his own. "Well, that's hard to say. There's several answers to that question. If you mean Jorge, then I think no, he won't be that stupid. He'll wait for us to come to him. If he isn't dead. But if you mean Carlos Alvarado, then I think the answer is a very big yes. Or sí, if you prefer.
"And by the way," he raised the object he had been holding on his lap, "I have all the guns."
"I knew you would find them," El said wearily.
"Of course I did," Sands said. It had taken him the better part of an hour spent crawling on his hands and knees to find them, but by God, he had done it.
He leaned forward, touching a finger to the makeshift bandage he had wrapped about his leg. It was wet with blood, but not growing any wetter, so he thought the wounds had stopped bleeding. "So tell me, how did you get caught?"
El did not respond to this for a while, and Sands wondered if he had passed out again. Then El said quietly, "I think I wanted them to find me."
Sands wished he had a cigarette. It was fucking cold in here, and he was starting to shiver under his wet clothes. "You know, that whole reverse psychology thing never works. I mean, look at you. So desperate to feel alive again, or anything at all, and then what? You got tortured for a month. Congratulations, El. You're living proof that people should be careful what they wish for."
"And you?" El asked. "What are you living proof of?"
Sands gave him a thin smile. "Trust no one."
El said nothing to that.
Sands sat back, frowning a little. Every conversation he had with El was a battle of words. The problem was, he didn't know who had won that one.
"I am surprised you are still in Culiacan," El said.
God, he needed a cigarette. "Why wouldn't I be? Just because you turned and ran doesn't mean I would. You brought me here to kill, so that's what I'm doing." He favored El with another smile. "I'm going to kill Carlos Alvarado."
"I think," El said grimly, "I will join you."
"No offense, El, but I'm not exactly keen on spending my time with an insane mariachi again. I think I can handle this one on my own."
"I am not insane," El said.
"Well, you could have fooled me," Sands said brightly. "I mean, sane people are always asking me to kill little kids."
"I knew you wouldn't do it," El muttered.
"Ohhh," Sands said in the tone of voice people used to exaggerate comprehension. "I get it. So you tell me to kill the kid knowing I'll say no, giving you the perfect excuse to kill me instead. I'm feeling so much better about you right now. Let's be best friends!"
He aimed the gun at El's head. "Let me tell you something." All trace of humor or casualness was gone from his voice. He was sincere now -- as sincere as he ever was. "I can't stand you. In fact, it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say I hope you die in this place. However." He let a smile touch the corners of his mouth. "For some strange reason I can't quite fathom, I seem to feel this odd potential for what might possibly be a kind of kinship with you. You savvy?"
"No," El said.
"Well, neither do I, but there it is," Sands said. "So I'm not going to kill you, much as I might like to. What I am going to do is get the hell out. You can do what you like, just so long as it does not involve coming within fifty miles of where I end up. And right now, since I am here to stay in Culiacan, that means you will find yourself a nice cozy little setup someplace far, far away. Get married again. Have lots of niños. Run for President. I don't care what you do, just leave me the fuck alone."
"And what happens after you kill Alvarado?" El asked. His voice jogged up and down, like he too was shivering.
"That's for me to know and you to never find out," Sands said. In truth he hadn't the faintest notion what he would do then, but that did not matter. In his former life he had firmly believed that planning in meticulous detail only applied to the rest of the world. It was good to know what everyone else was going to do next. Not so much for himself. It was better to be flexible and spontaneous. All the better to take advantage of whatever happened around him.
So he trusted that he would figure out what to do next and where to go when the appropriate time came. Until then there was no sense worrying about it.
"I am sorry," El said.
Sands cocked his head. "Can I get that in writing? Oh wait..."
"The boy." El was definitely shivering now. "Is he all right?"
"Oh sure," Sands said with a lofty wave of the gun. "Nothing a decade or two in therapy won't fix."
"I didn't mean to hurt him," El said. "I just..."
"Yeah yeah yeah," Sands said. "That whole 'I'm so dead inside, why can't I feel anything?' problem. You know that gets really old, really fast, El."
"You knew?" El asked. Stupidly enough, he sounded insulted. Which was about the dumbest thing Sands had ever heard. El was hardly subtle at the best of times, and the months they had spent together had been about as subtle as a brick.
Thunder boomed overhead. The rain, which had been slackening off, began to come down harder. Exasperated, Sands said, "I think all of Mexico knew."
El said nothing to this. He just lay on the couch where Sands had dumped him, and shivered. After a time his breathing evened out, and Sands realized he was asleep.
He sighed. He considered waking El up just so they could argue again, then decided it wasn't worth it. So he simply sat where he was, and listened to the rain.
****
The sound of gunshots dragged El back to consciousness. He wanted to be alert – a gun being fired was never a good sound – but he just couldn't do it. The best he could manage was a semi-lucid, wobbly look around the room.
Sands was still sitting on the couch. He was firing into the floor. His hair was drying in loose curls about his face, but his clothes were obviously still wet, because he was shivering.
No sooner had El thought this than a wave of trembling swept over his own body. He gritted his teeth at the pain that erupted in his ribs and shoulder, and groaned.
Sands went very still. The ends of the blindfold fluttered against his cheek. "El? You awake?"
"What is it?" he asked.
"What it is is that I'm fucking freezing to death over here. Get up and find some dry wood. We're going to build a fire."
El stared at him in disbelief. There were so many things wrong with what Sands had just said that he didn't know where to begin.
Sands brought the gun around and aimed it at his head. "Move."
"There's no fireplace," El said.
"Don't make me shoot you, El."
"There is no dry wood," he said. It was much dimmer in the house now. He judged the time to be late afternoon. The clouds outside were slate gray. Rain ran down the windows and drummed on the roof.
"Look around you," Sands said in a tone that suggested his patience was wearing thin. Very thin. "There's got to be a chair or two we can take apart. Now, I can't see, you can't use your hands, and I don't have the time to crawl all over this fucking house looking for what I need, so you're going to have to tell me where to go."
"Why are you still here?" he asked. "I thought you were leaving."
"I left my umbrella in the car," Sands said shortly. "Now start talking."
El looked around him. The room they were in had two long couches placed at right angles to each other. Currently he and Sands were occupying those couches. One other wall had two armchairs and the fourth wall was empty.
There was also a coffee table. It had been pushed to one side, so that it stood directly in front of the two armchairs. It was made of wood.
"To your right," El said. "A table." Then he said, "Are your matches dry?"
"If they weren't, do you think I'd be talking about a fire?" Sands snapped. He maneuvered himself to the edge of the couch, and then lowered himself to the floor. His face tightened with pain, and he kept his leg stuck stiffly out in front of him. "How far?"
El told him. Sands moved across the floor, using his hands and his good leg. When he was near the table, El warned him, and Sands reached out and found the wooden table. He took hold of it and grinned.
Fifteen minutes later, they had a fire. Sands had opened a window, and rain pattered onto the floor, but it gave the smoke an outlet to escape. El tried not to think about what would happen if the wrong people saw that smoke rising from the house, and concentrated on soaking up the warmth cast by the flames.
He looked at his reluctant companion, and then frowned. Sands had left the gun on the cushion of the couch in order to cross the floor and reach the table. Right now, in fact, El was closer to it than he was. El found it hard to believe that Sands would voluntarily give up possession of the gun, and he wondered how it had happened. Either Sands was hurt more than he was letting on, or he had decided to take a chance and trust El. Whatever the real reason was, El knew he would never find out for sure.
He closed his eyes. He had been in pain for so long it seemed almost inconceivable that there had been a time when he had not known its steel touch. He needed a sling for his arm. He was so tired. The fire was warm but it was too small, and he was still shivering.
"Damnit."
Reluctantly El opened his eyes. Sands sat on the other side of the fire, nursing his thumb. "I think I got a splinter when I destroyed that table."
El was not surprised. Sands had attacked the wood with surprising fury, making him glad he was not on the receiving end of the man's anger.
Which reminded him of something Sands had said. Something about a strange kinship. "How did you know?" he asked. "You said you knew what I was going through."
Sands lowered his hand back to his lap. "Well, you were pretty obvious, El."
"You have experienced it," El prompted.
Sands laughed. "Hardly. I just know what you're doing. I see it all the time. You lose everything, so you shut down. You're not the first person it's happened to, and you won't be the last. The only difference between you and everyone else is that you tried to fight it. Most everyone else just goes on about their business."
"Music meant everything to me," El said quietly.
"Well you can still play the kazoo," Sands offered brightly.
"I lost my wife and my child," El said. "I have lost all my friends."
"Friends will stab you in the back and families are overrated," Sands said.
El looked at him. "Does nothing mean anything to you?"
"You're looking at him, El." Sands gave him a cold smile. "Me. I mean something to me. I mean a lot to me."
"Then why did you save me?" El asked. "If everything you do is for selfish reasons, why save me?"
"So I could tell you to leave me the fuck alone," Sands retorted. But a strange look darkened his face as he said it, as if he realized how lame the answer truly was.
"Dead men bother no one," El said.
Sands pursed his lips, but said nothing. He just sat there, holding his hands out to the flames. The firelight cast deep shadows on his face, emphasizing its sharp planes and angles. The strip of fabric he had torn from his shirt was very black. As it had dried it had conformed to the shape of his head, and it sunk inward in two distinct places as it crossed his face.
"Do you still dream?" El asked.
Sands was taken aback. "Are you asking literally or metaphorically?"
El frowned. He had meant it literally, but he could understand why Sands was not sure of his meaning. Sitting here around a fire, sheltered from the wind and rain, they had been taken out of their normal world and brought to a place where the rules no longer applied. He could ask questions about things like dreams, and Sands was free to answer them, and there would be no threats or talk of killing. "I mean do you dream at night when you sleep?"
Sands made a wry face. "Yeah, I do. But not like I used to. You know how in a regular dream, it's like being in a movie, and everything moves all around you? Now I just see things being still. Like looking at a photo album."
"But you can see in them," El said. "In your dreams."
"Yeah, I can see," Sands said, very quietly.
Silence stretched out between them. El wanted to ask about the kinship Sands had mentioned, but it was still too soon. The light outside grew dimmer, and he thought about the kerosene lamps he had seen, but he did not remember seeing any of the actual liquid itself. And there was something almost comforting about sitting in the gloom with only a fire to provide light. Some people, he remembered, had nothing at all to keep the darkness at bay.
With nothing else to do, his mind turned inward. It wanted to relive the agony of his captivity, and he had to wrench it away from those memories with a shudder. He never wanted to think about that again. It had happened, but he had been saved. He was free again.
Free to do what, exactly? Sands had spoken cruelly to him, but honestly. He had lost everything. He had nothing to live for.
Friends will stab you in the back and families are overrated.
He did not believe that. The best years of life had been the ones he had spent first with Carolina, and then with his daughter. He had been surrounded by love and laughter and music, and all the hardships he had experienced to reach that point had been worth it. He had been truly happy then.
Now they were all gone. Carolina and his daughter. Lorenzo and Fideo. All the friends, lovers and musicians who had come before. There was no one left.
No one except the man sitting across from him. The man who hated him. The man who had saved his life.
Sands was still shivering. His left leg was straight out in front of him, a bloody bandage tied about it just above the knee. He was holding his hands out to the fire, which was already beginning to die down. They would need to add more wood, and soon.
He wondered if Sands had any idea how deeply lonely he was.
He thought about the woman, Ajedrez. Sands had trusted her with his secrets, and she had betrayed him to Barillo. El's memories of her were drug-foggy and not the best, but even during the brief time he had spent in her company, he had known she was dangerous and not to be trusted. It was a measure of how desperately Sands had wanted contact with someone that he had ignored the warnings that must surely have gone off in his head, and confided in her anyway.
Thinking things like that could almost make El feel sorry for him.
He closed his eyes again. He remembered the way Carolina had smiled at him, a secret smile hinting at things only she and he knew. When she had smiled at him like that, he had felt like they were the only two people in the world.
Deliberately not thinking about what he was doing, he scooted around the fire. He kept his eyes closed – that too made it easier.
Sands stiffened as he got closer. "What are you doing?" he asked warily.
"I am declaring a truce," El said. "For today. So that we might live to fight the battle some other day."
He had to open his eyes so he could see where he was going. The fire was dipping low, and its light was pale and red. Sands looked confused and uncertain. "El?"
"I do not want to die here," El said.
"You're not going to die," Sands said automatically. One hand had gone to his hip, and now he looked dismayed as he realized he had left the gun behind. "What are you doing, El?"
"Turn around," El said. "The fire is dying, and we are still wet. If we sit with our backs to each other, we can get dry faster, and our body heat will keep us warm."
Sands laughed. "Oh, my Christ," he said. "This is certainly unexpected. I wouldn't have pulled you from that river if I had known I would have to be defending my virtue from you."
El turned so his back was to Sands, and his right side was being toasted by the fire. His injured shoulder moaned at the extra heat, and he clenched his jaw and bowed his head. "It will be a long night," he said.
"The longest ever," Sands agreed. But he scooted about so he could lean up against El.
They sat there, very still. At first El shivered harder from the contact with Sands' wet clothing, but gradually the extra body heat began to compensate for it, and the worst of his chills abated.
Pain and exhaustion reached up to claw at him. They whispered to him. The fire sank into red embers. There was a head resting on his shoulder.
Slowly he sank to the floor. He slept.
****
When he woke, it was morning. It had stopped raining, and he was alone.
******
