TIMING: Current
LOCATION: Near the 3 Daggers
PARTIES: Wyatt (@loftylockjaw) & Emilio (@mortemoppetere)
SUMMARY: Emilio overhears something concerning at the hunter bar, and heads out to warn Wyatt. He isn’t happy with what he finds.
CONTENT WARNINGS: Suicidal ideation
—
He didn’t spend a lot of time in the 3 Daggers anymore. It hadn’t felt like a place he belonged in a long time now, since Rhett’s van or the shit with Andy and the hunter. Any time since, trying to fit in among the hunters in the bar served only as a reminder that he didn’t anymore. Overhearing conversations the other hunters had made him nervous, made him wonder if he needed to send a warning to someone he cared about who wasn’t quite human enough for their liking, and he hated that. He hated the way it made his palms sweat, hated the fact that it made him question if he still belonged among the people who were meant to be like him.
But he went anyway.
He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was some kind of punishment he felt he deserved, or maybe some part of him was still trying to shove himself back into place like a puzzle piece forced in a spot it didn’t go. Maybe he needed to hear those hunters talk so he could know to warn anyone who needed warning if their name came up. Or maybe there was no answer. Maybe some things were little more than a force of habit. Emilio didn’t know for sure. It was one of those things he probably never really would.
The drinks were cheap enough, at least. He was only on his second — a slow night, by his standards. In an hour or so, he’d be deeper in, be swaying in his seat in a state of the closest thing to relaxed he knew how to find these days. But he was painfully sober now; it was the only reason he was able to make out the conversation happening beside him.
“Took a bounty off the board. Some kind of alligator shifter. Some rich bitch is footing the bill.”
“Should be easy enough. Chop off its head, it’ll make quick work. You gonna buy me that drink you owe me after?”
“Fuck you, since when do I owe you a drink? You’re such a fuckin’...”
He tuned them out. The rest of the conversation mattered less than the beginning of it. There were other shifters in town, other lamia. Logically, Emilio knew this. But… he also knew that few people had the same ability to find trouble as Wyatt. And he still owed the guy. Twice now, maybe.
(That was the only reason he got up. Nothing deeper than a debt that needed paying. He repeated it in his head as if it might make it true, as if there was no quiet tension in his shoulders, no clenching in his chest. Wyatt saved his ass twice now, and Emilio owed him for that. Maybe part of him wanted to make sure he was all right for Xóchitl’s sake, too, but that was it. That was all.)
Sliding off the barstool, he threw down a few bills to pay his tab (this was the only bar in town where he couldn’t get away with skipping out on it) and hurried out the door, making his way back towards town. He’d text Wyatt, he’d…
He trailed off. There were footprints in the snow not far from the bar. Not human, but… reptile. Heavy ones, with a shock of red coloring some parts of snow. Emilio cursed quietly under his breath and moved to follow him. Either there was some kind of monster stalking the bar… or Wyatt was stupider than he looked. Emilio wasn’t sure which option was the preferable one.
—
He really didn’t like eating big meals in the winter. If it were summertime, Wyatt could just wander into the woods, find a nice sunny spot in the ferns, and take a long nap. But things as they were, with snow on the ground and no sign of the storm ever letting up, he had to eat and run. Or, well… walk quickly, sort of. It was hard to eat and walk at the same time, the gator tromping along and tossing his head back every few minutes to swallow down a bit more of the meal. It wasn’t very chewed up, unfortunately, seeing as how he hadn’t wanted to wait around to see if anyone would turn up, especially not being that close to a bar full of hunters. He’d grabbed the girl and the folder and booked it, silencing her screams as quick as he could, which of course was leaving a trail.
Said folder was currently tucked under one arm, blood smeared across its cover. Wyatt paused, dropping down onto all four to give himself better leverage to snap the body father back into his throat, crunching down and pulverizing bone. Her clothes didn’t taste great, he could have done without that, but there hadn’t been time to disrobe her. With an inward sigh, he realized he was proving Anita’s point of him being full of shit and glass — he could hear her stupid phone ringing, apparently having avoided the brunt of his chewing. Whatever.
Her feet disappeared down his throat as he gave one last, hefty gulp, standing stock still and waiting for it to pass a little father before he could really move again.
He heard something in between the trills of the phone, muffled by his own guts and thick skin — the gator glanced back the way he’d come, letting out a long, threatening hiss. If someone was following him… he wasn’t fucked. This was fine. He could still tear a bitch in half, yeah?
A painful belch ripped its way out of his throat, and the lamia groaned. Maybe not.
—
As he got closer, he could almost hear it. It was muffled, still, his bad ear making it fainter than it might have been if both still worked the way they used to, but if he concentrated around it, focused on his good side instead, there was the faintest sounds of bones crunching. If he were more naive, he might be able to convince himself that it was footsteps crushing the crisp snow, but Emilio knew better. He knew the sound of bones grinding far better than most, knew what it sounded like when pieces of a body were crushed between something powerful. He might not have been able to follow the sound — it was too faint for that — but he could certainly trail the footprints in the snow. They seemed to shuffle, seemed to sway, but not in the way they might have if the thing making them was hurt. It looked different, though he couldn’t put his finger on the cause. At least… not until he came round the corner and found the gator there, gouged on whatever meal he’d found for himself. Judging by the bloodied folder in his hand, the meal wasn’t that of the animal variety. Emilio tensed immediately.
He recognized Wyatt, even if he’d only seen the lamia in this form a handful of times. He looked the same here as he had the first time Emilio met him, when he’d just swallowed a hunter and had seemed tempted to make it two. Was that what had happened, then? Had Wyatt found another hunter outside the 3 Daggers, decided to make a meal of them? It was a far cry from how he’d been with Owen, the way he’d been willing to plant himself between the slayer and Eve’s gun. Emilio’s hand went to his pocket on instinct, touching a knife that he wasn’t sure he wanted to use.
“The fuck do you think you’re doing?” He snapped, uncertainty bleeding through with the anger in his tone. He’d called Wyatt to that barn. He’d enlisted his help outside the bar, when they’d sat together in his car and discussed their shared issues with Owen. He was beginning to consider Wyatt an ally, maybe even something halfway resembling a friend. But if there was a hunter in his gut now, where did that leave Emilio? He’d written off the first one, when he and Wyatt met in that clearing in the woods, because Wyatt had saved his ass immediately after. What would it say if he wrote off a second?
(What kind of hunter was he now? He didn’t know anymore. He’d asked Wyatt for help against Owen. He took advice from Metzli, he loved Nora so much he ached with it. He’d saved Ariadne from Rhett’s van, he protected Alex, he cared about Zane. What kind of hunter did all that? If his mother could see him not, she’d be ashamed. Emilio thought he ought to be ashamed, too. He wasn’t sure if he was or not.)
He continued to eye Wyatt, gripped the knife even if he didn’t take it from his pocket. “What did you do? Who are you…” He trailed off. Did he want to know the answer? He wasn’t sure, but he knew he wouldn’t do much resting until he did.
—
The relief that he might have felt upon seeing a familiar (quasi-friendly) face instead of an unknown was dampened by two things: firstly, Emilio seemed to have made quick work of deducing that what he’d just finished swallowing wasn’t a wild animal, if his tone was anything to go by. Secondly… Emilio knew her. Winter. Perhaps not well – Wyatt had no idea if they’d kept in touch at all after Emilio had ‘rescued’ her from the shifter – but almost certainly well enough to be pissed that his effort earlier in the year had been undone.
He didn’t immediately answer the questions, instead staring silently at Emilio as the phone rang a final time in his stomach, then went quiet. He swallowed again, trying to find the room to speak around the legs in his throat, but he still needed a minute or two. Flipping open the folder in his claws, Wyatt selectively chose the top piece of paper: the bounty that had been hung in the hunter bar, that only had vague details on Wyatt himself and the person who was willing to pay for his head. Everything else in the folder remained tucked away, set on the forest floor beneath his foot as he crumpled the first sheet and tossed it Emilio’s way.
Sinking into a squat and tilting his head back as far as he could, Wyatt hoped that gravity would help speed this digestion along. After a large meal like this, he much preferred to lay somewhere quiet and give it a few hours. And wouldn’t you know it, the last time he’d met Emilio in the woods, he’d had a stomach full of human as well. Better shredded, though, which had allowed him some more mobility than he had now. Plus, he couldn’t remember if he’d even eaten the whole hunter then, or if he’d gotten distracted by the man standing in front of him, thinking him a threat at the time.
He still could be.
—
Wyatt didn’t say anything. Emilio wondered if he could or not. There was a phone ringing, muffled not by the way his ear had never recovered from that banshee’s scream but from how it was ringing through the gator’s thick hide from somewhere down his throat. He kept throwing his head back, throat moving as he tried to swallow. Emilio didn’t know much about reptiles, or even lamia; this wasn’t exactly his territory, and even Juliana hadn’t been focused on them much. He didn’t know how a meal like this worked, didn’t know if it made it harder to speak the way it seemed to make it harder to move. Wyatt didn’t seem to be choking on it, in any case. He was just… swallowing.
Emilio watched as Wyatt removed a paper from the folder, tense as he slid it over. He didn’t think the lamia was much of a threat like this. He was moving slow, still focused on swallowing his meal. It wasn’t much like the first time they’d met under these circumstances, when Wyatt had been both willing and capable of taking a damn bite out of him. But the discomfort outweighed the logic, and his grip on that hidden knife tightened. Wyatt had probably met him enough times now to know what the hand in his pocket was holding, but Emilio doubted he felt threatened by it, even in this state. A knife wasn’t the most effective weapon against an alligator. The best shot for both of them would be the one where Emilio didn’t use his weapon at all.
Keeping a wary eye on Wyatt, Emilio leaned down and picked up the paper with his free hand, gripping it tightly. He looked it over, unsurprised by the writing there. He’d come out here because he’d heard the hunters in the bar talking about an incoming bounty, after all. “Yeah,” he said, “I know. That’s not what I asked.” Was there an answer Wyatt could give him that would untangle the knot in his stomach? Was there a response that would make him feel better instead of worse?
He wanted to like Wyatt. He did. After what they’d been through with Owen, after their journey through those thorns and the tunnels underground, he wanted to feel some sense of camaraderie with the guy. But there was a muffled phone ringing in his throat, and there was a person digesting in his stomach. And it was hypocritical for Emilio to feel uneasy by that, he knew. He had enough blood on his hands to fill an ocean with red, and he was the last person who ought to judge someone for something like this. But his hand gripped that knife so tightly his fingers were beginning to ache, and his throat felt tight, anyway. He wanted to like Wyatt. The guy just didn’t know how to make it easy.
—
He knew? Then why the interrogation? Somewhat annoyed (how long had he known? Did he frequent whatever place Winter had been heading? Had he seen this bounty before and just never said anything? Why was he here now? Lots of questions he wanted to ask, but couldn’t yet. Holding up one claw in a gesture of ‘give us a minute’, Wyatt stood to his full height and stretched his maw toward the treetops, making one final effort to gulp the girl down.
It worked, and he felt her limbs sliding beyond his airway, finally freeing him up to speak. First, though… a shoe had become dislodged as she was squeezed by powerful throat muscles, and the lamia gave a rather gnarly-sounding hack, hunching over and spitting the shoe out into the snow. It was on the smaller side and clearly feminine in design, if that made a difference. Still, he gently pushed it away as he turned to face Emilio, picking up the folder again and holding it to his chest.
“Ate the one tryna get me killed, boss,” he grunted. “What you doin’ out here? N’ why you followin’ me?” Had he found something of Winter’s left behind? Her car, maybe… he couldn’t be sure, it was dark and he’d been trying to get out of there as fast as possible. But if Emilio had suspected it was Wyatt he was tailing… “Fellas not allowed to defend himself these days?”
—
Wyatt stood, and Emilio wondered absently if it was meant as an act of intimidation. The full height of the lamia was certainly large enough to terrify most, and the fact that he was still working on swallowing whoever he’d just eaten certainly added to it. But all Emilio could think of was the way Wyatt had looked crouched in front of Owen. The gator’s throat worked to push a corpse down to his gut, and all Emilio could hear were the quiet pleas he’d murmured to a man he’d threatened to kill just a few days prior.
Of course, Emilio knew he wasn’t Owen. Of course he knew Wyatt held none of the same affection towards him. (Was he worth less, then? The thought that Owen was worth more than he was sat heavy like a stone in his gut, churned uncomfortably behind the still-healing wound left by the other slayer’s knife.) But it was a little hard to feel intimidated by someone you’d seen in such a state so recently. It was a little difficult to see someone pleading for the life of a monster one day and worry that they might swallow you whole the next, even if they were spitting bloody shoes from between their teeth. Emilio’s eyes drifted to the shoe just before Wyatt kicked it away, memorizing it. It clearly belonged to a woman, which meant nothing if the woman in question was a hunter. Especially not to Emilio, whose family had been so matriarchal. The women in his family had been far more dangerous than the men, after all.
Except… Wyatt said he ate the one trying to get him killed rather than the one trying to kill him. That was significant. “And who was that?” Not a hunter, maybe, if she wasn’t trying to kill him directly. Whoever posted the bounty? The guy back at the 3 Daggers had said it was someone wealthy, which tracked with something like this. You had to have money to throw at a bounty if you wanted to pique most people’s interest. His mind was spinning, placing pieces together but still not possessing quite enough to solve the whole puzzle. “Heard some ranger back in the bar talking about a bounty for a lagarto. Figured you were the only one stupid enough to end up with something like that. I was coming to warn your sorry ass.” He glanced off in the direction of the shoe Wyatt had kicked away, though he didn’t keep his eyes off the lamia for long. “Never said that, did I? Just asked a question. Still haven’t gotten much of an answer.” Sure, Wyatt had answered in vague terms… but why keep it vague? Why act defensive? Emilio had met him eating a hunter and had been willing to walk away from it. He had no reason to think it would be different now… unless there was more to the story he wasn’t sharing.
Unless the shoe belonged to someone familiar.
—
And who was that? Wyatt didn’t know how to answer without lying, so a lie it would have to be. Except Emilio kept talking, rattling off a word that Wyatt didn’t know. “Lagarto? And what — with a bounty? Just means I’m… effective.” Or careless. Perhaps both. But Emilio had been coming to warn him? That was surprising. Maybe more surprising than it ought to have been, but… Wyatt didn’t know how to broach the subject of Owen. Of the fact that he and Emilio had been ready to kill each other, at least from where he stood. Had tried to, but had failed. He had no love in his heart left for Owen (yes he did), but he still didn’t appreciate the fact that Emilio had been so ready to murder him. Which was… hypocritical, again, because Wyatt had felt the very same way, once. For a few minutes at least. And Owen had been ready to kill Emilio, which was a whole other can of worms the shifter wasn’t prepared to open. Suffice it to say, he hadn’t foreseen a world where Emilio would stick his neck out for him. Unless he felt like he still owed him.
Whatever the reason for it, Wyatt wished he hadn’t come. He was asking too many questions, pressing too hard when all Wyatt wanted to do was sleep. “Ahh, leave it,” he growled. “Don’t matter who it was, she had it out fer me n’ I saw fit to end it. Had… little snoops snoopin’ around, diggin’ shit up that ain’t none of their business. Was gonna take this,” he shook the folder in his claws for emphasis, “to some no account hunter n’ sic ‘em on me. What was I supposed to do? N’ why you care so damn much? Shit.” The final word was huffed out in exasperation, the lamia waving a dismissive hand in Emilio’s direction before he started to walk away from him and deeper into the woods toward home.
—
“That’s what you are, dumbass,” he snapped, frustration growing deeper with each passing moment. The more Wyatt evaded the question, the more certain Emilio became that someone familiar was digesting in his gut. But who? Probably not a hunter, which meant Daiyu and Jade were off the list. (There was a surge of relief at that, too, so stifling he nearly choked on it.) Wyatt didn’t know Emilio well enough to be aware of most of the people he would care about unless he’d done some digging, though Emilio wouldn’t put such a thing past him. (Perhaps that notion was due more to his own paranoia than it was to anything he knew about Wyatt personally.) There seemed too many options. He couldn’t discount that Wyatt might assume he cared more than he did about someone, or made other assumptions that might not necessarily be true. The only way to know the answer for certain was for Wyatt to tell him, and he wasn’t sure that was going to come easily.
He couldn’t argue with the idea that Wyatt had been defending himself. He knew how hunters could be when they caught wind of something, understood just how tightly some of them would grip a target. He was the same way himself sometimes, though never for a bounty. Still, part of him couldn’t help but judge the lamia for swallowing someone who’d evidently been no physical threat to him. Eating a hunter who’d been trying to slice him open was one thing, but someone whose crime had been siccing other people on the gator? That seemed a slippier slope. Stubbornly, he followed behind the lamia, glad that his full stomach was slowing his pace. If he were moving at his normal speed, Emilio doubted his bad leg would have allowed him to keep up. (It was worse in the winter. That was part of why he hated the cold.) “Maybe because I give a shit about Xó, and she likes you. Think she’s had enough bullshit in her life already.” It wasn’t the whole truth, but he wasn’t sure Wyatt knew to call him out on that. For whatever reason, Emilio cared about Wyatt, too. Maybe there it was the kind of bond that came with fucking the same shitty guy, or maybe nearly bleeding out in front of someone twice made you feel a little bit of kinship towards them. If pushed, he’d probably insist it was little more than a need for answers. He’d never been a very good liar. “I’ll follow you home if I have to. Don’t think you’ve got enough room to take a bite out of me, too, so you can either answer me or deal with me knocking on your door until morning. Pretty sure only one of us doesn’t have to sleep.” At least not much.
—
Well… he sure wasn't wrong about that. Xó deserved, among many other things, someone who was less of a ticking time bomb than Wyatt. He lapsed into an annoyed, upset silence, trying to determine just how mad Emilio was going to be to hear the truth. Could he lie? He could try, but pretending he hadn't known who she was wouldn't really fly, otherwise how would he have known to follow her here?
Growling to himself, Wyatt kept his attention on the forest floor ahead of him. What did it matter if Emilio was mad? What was he going to do about it? The… kinship there wasn't something worth hanging on to, seeing as how he was planning on cutting ties with most everyone in his life. So… fuck it.
“Winter,” he grumbled. “That little bitch that I pushed outta the tree. She kept comin’ for me. Was goddamn sick of it. Of her. She went too far.”
—
Raising a child — even if you hadn’t done it for particularly long — gave a person a few additional skills they might not have had otherwise. When Flora knew she’d done something she wasn’t meant to do, when she was trying to decide whether to spin up a lie or face the consequences that came with owning up to the truth, she always got a particular look in her eye. It was the same look Wyatt had now as the gears spun in his head, the same thing lit up behind his eyes. And Emilio had to say, it had looked a lot cuter on his four-year-old. On Flora, it had been charming, endearing. On Wyatt, it only really served to piss him off.
In any case, his familiarity with that look meant that he could tell when Wyatt settled on telling the truth instead of making up a lie that Emilio wouldn’t have pretended to believe. So he grit his teeth, he clenched his fists, and he waited for the truth.
And the truth came, of course. Emilio pressed his tongue against his teeth, dug his nails into his palms. Winter. He’d saved her twice — once from Wyatt, once from the damn shark in the sand. He’d saved her twice, and she was dead anyway. And there was something about that that made his stomach lurch a little, something about it that burned. “She went too far,” he repeated flatly. “You don’t think fucking eating her was going too far? Jesus fucking Christ. Could’ve run her out of town. Could’ve taken a lot of fucking steps before this one.”
—
Emilio’s anger was expected, but still unwelcome. Wyatt felt himself bristle defensively, gritting his teeth as he gripped the folder in his claws even tighter. “No, actually, I think eatin’ her was a perfectly fine fuckin’ reaction,” he snapped. “What makes you think I was gonna be able to convince her of shit? Obviously I didn’t put enough fear in ‘er the first time, and she was bleedin’ in my damn mouth. Nothin’ short of death was gonna deter that girl, and she—” His voice became strangled in his throat, grating against his vocal chords before petering out into nothing.
In the folder he still clutched was information on his family. His mother and father, his aunts and uncles, cousins… all of them that could be found, had been. And that information was about to be given to a ranger, who no doubt had ties with people in or around Louisiana who’d jump at the chance to wipe out a whole family of lamias.
Sucking in a breath, Wyatt kept on moving through the snow, his gait slow but steady. “She was gonna send ‘em after mon maman et papere. My family. I couldn’t… let that happen. N’ I knew she weren’t gonna stop. So I took care of it.”
—
Wyatt’s anger rose up to match his own, and it was exactly the reaction Emilio had been looking for. He didn’t know what to do with the feeling in his gut, with the confirmation that his efforts to save someone had proven pointless in the end. (How often was that the case, he wondered? How many of the people he’d saved had turned around and gotten themselves killed anyway, just a few months after the fact?) The anger felt more useful, felt familiar. Grief was useless, but anger could be sharpened, could be weaponized. (Did he want to use it against Wyatt? It wasn’t a question that had ever really mattered. Emilio’s rage, sharpened to a point, was thrown like a spear by his own hands whether he wanted it to be or not. It didn’t matter if he intended for it to hurt anyone; it would anyway. And he’d tell himself he felt better after, even if he didn’t.)
But then, Wyatt’s voice tapered off. The anger faded, as anger always tended to do. Emilio had never met anyone who could hold onto it as well as he could, no matter how he tried. For him, it was a constant state of being. He woke up angry, went to bed furious, raged for every moment in between. For the rest of the world, though, it was a fire that burned out quickly. It wasn’t enough for Emilio. He wanted more.
But when Wyatt spoke again, he faltered. He’d done it to protect his family, he said, and Emilio saw a flash of a living room in Mexico, blood staining the carpet. His stomach churned. Whatever Wyatt had done, whatever Winter had thought made him worthy of her ire… his family wasn’t a part of it. Emilio swallowed, taking a few steps after Wyatt. He didn’t have to keep in constant motion to keep pace with the slow-moving gator, which was a good thing. His leg ached from the cold, and his chest ached from something he couldn’t quite put a finger on.
“Probably shouldn’t have eaten her so close to the fucking bar,” he said flatly. “You know you’re leaving a pretty obvious trail in the snow, don’t you? Somebody comes out of there who knows more about what you are than I do, they can put the pieces together well enough to know to follow.” He paused a moment. Then, looking at Wyatt carefully, he swept his feet through the snow. A portion of the trail left by the gator was swept away, leaving a gap between one part of the trail and the next. “You don’t cover this shit up, and somebody is going to follow you home. And I don’t — I don’t give a shit, you know, what happens. But Xó does. And if you get yourself killed because you’re too stupid to cover your fucking tracks…” He trailed off, hand coming up idly to where his necklace sat beneath his shirt. Juliana’s ring hung there, alongside his own wedding band now that he’d replaced it on his finger with the ring Teddy gave him. “Just… don’t let any of those assholes follow you home.” He was protecting his family. Emilio, of all people, wouldn’t fault him now that he knew that, even if part of him still ached with the pointlessness of it all.
—
He wasn’t arguing anymore, wasn’t telling Wyatt he shouldn’t have eaten her, that he should have left well enough alone. At the mention of Wyatt’s family, Emilio was backing off. The shifter stored that knowledge away for later, in case he ever needed it again. Hoped he wouldn’t, but… you could never be too sure. He watched Emilio swipe at the trail he was leaving — of course he’d thought about it to an extent, but he hadn’t known what to do about it. “Didn’t know there was a whole ass bar out here just for hunters until I was already tailin’ her. There weren’t time to do it right.” Whatever ‘right’ was. Nothing about this felt very right.
“Anyway… she’s gonna have to deal with losin’ me some day. Figure it don’t much matter if it’s today or a year from now.” He gave a groan, dropping onto all fours again. This girl wasn’t agreeing with him.
“But I’ll… call Eve.” There was a car left behind, one with Winter’s personal belongings in it. That and the trail into the woods ought to go. “Unless you wanna do it, Captain Wow. Gonna have to wait until I get to the house; didn’t bring my effects with me.”
—
“Should keep up with shit like that.” It wasn’t really something he could fault Wyatt for not knowing, of course; the 3 Daggers tended to keep itself on the down low, didn’t exactly go announcing its location to shifters. But Emilio was angry and frustrated and his stomach was still churning, and he needed somewhere to point all that. He needed someplace to put his anger, needed a container to hold the grief, and Wyatt was the only one here. If he couldn’t be angry at Wyatt for protecting his family, he’d be angry at him for not protecting himself. Even if Emilio knew he was the last person who could call someone out on that.
His jaw tightened, the wedding ring hanging around his neck feeling a little less like a necklace and more like a noose. “She won’t, you know.” It was flat, his tone not betraying much. “She won’t deal with it. Not something anybody deals with. She’ll carry it with her the rest of her life. Wake up every goddamn morning drowning in it. And it’ll matter to her, when it happens. You lose someone like that, you’d end the fucking world just to have had them around for another fucking second. So it matters. You can go and get yourself killed, but you remember that it fucking matters while you’re doing it.”
Eve. Not a bad idea. “I’ll call her,” he said, because it was something to do with his hands. Because Wyatt waiting until he got home to do it would mean too much time in between, because Emilio couldn’t be sure he’d actually call when he was acting like a man on his way to the gallows, because he needed to feel useful somehow, to someone, even if it wasn’t who he might have wanted. “Just get the fuck out of here, and leave someone else to clean up your fucking mess. Guess that’s the big plan, anyway.”
—
The gator just scoffed, otherwise ignoring the remark about the hunter bar. How was he supposed to have known that? None of the hunters in his life had ever taken it upon themselves to tell him, after all.
His annoyance faded with Emilio’s deliverance of wisdom regarding his own demise: he supposed the guy had to know a thing or two about loss, given his occupation and his general demeanor. The way he was talking about how Xochitl would (or in this case, wouldn’t) handle Wyatt’s death easily sounded like it came from experience. Wyatt wondered idly who it was that he mourned before settling into the guilty feeling, trying to convince himself that it was a warm blanket instead of a layer of frost over his heart. It would be for her own good. He’d do his best to make sure she hated him before he kicked the bucket: it would hurt less that way, right? (He thought of Owen in that barn, and he worried that it wasn’t true.) Whatever the case, there wasn’t much more for him to say on the subject. It didn’t matter what Emilio thought because it was happening regardless. Most of his nights were spent at the Pit these days, because he figured none of the people that might come looking for him would know to check there. She’ll get over me. She has Mateo.
Grunting in acknowledgement when Emilio said he’d call Eve, Wyatt heaved an inward sigh. He’d had no real intention of doing that, but at least this didn’t require any effort on his part. He didn’t care if someone followed him home, but if Emilio cared enough to do something about it, then let him. “Yep,” he answered in a clipped voice. “That’s the plan.” He didn’t look back again as he continued in the direction of the cabin, knowing Emilio wasn’t going to follow him all the way there. The folder in his hands felt exceptionally heavy, and with each labored step toward home, he felt more and more afraid of looking inside of it. Winter had mentioned his mother, and he’d be shocked if there wasn’t more information about her in there. A phone number, maybe.
Maybe a phone call was in order, if he could muster the courage. If anyone could help him find his way again, it would be his maman.
TIMING: current
SETTING: outside a club / emilio's old apartment
PARTIES: @mortemoppetere + @apaininyourneck
WARNINGS: suicidal ideation
SUMMARY: owen and emilio are fighting, again. things take a weird turn, again.
I hope the fences we mended
Fall down beneath their own weight
And I hope we hang on past the last exit
I hope it's already too late
What was a return to normalcy for a man who’d never been familiar with what constituted as normal? The situation with Owen had overtaken his life for the last few months, coloring everything else in his life with suspicion and doubt regardless of whether it was earned or not. There were still other things to worry about, of course — the damned demon threatening to burst out of the ground was an overwhelming concern — but the ability to focus on other things had returned with the end of the mystery surrounding Owen’s behavior, and Emilio was glad for it.
It meant he could fall back on more normal hunts, focus more on taking out people who needed taking out and not have to grapple with the complex emotions that had come with Owen being among them. This hunt could be a simple one. A vampire with too much blood on its hands, a monster with sharp teeth and red eyes. He could put a stake in its chest and it would explode into dust instead of bleeding on the floor, and that would be better. That would be good.
The stake was already out as he slid into the alley. This particular vampire was brutal, but predictable. He’d step outside the building beside the alley and wait for someone to pass by at the mouth of it so he could pull them in and open their throat, just as he’d done every other night this week. Little did he know that, tonight, it was him who’d never make it out of the alleyway.
Leaning against the wall opposite the door the vampire would soon exit, Emilio lit up a cigarette and clenched his teeth around the way each movement pulled at the stitches in his stomach. It was a miracle he hadn’t popped a stitch yet; distantly, he thought Eve would probably be impressed. Taking a long drag of the cigarette, he sighed. He probably wouldn’t be able to make the same claim when he left here tonight. Fights like the one he knew likely lay ahead of him didn’t tend to end bloodlessly for anyone involved.
—
This made sense. It didn’t make much sense to his body, used to all kinds of strain and testing of limits but never to this extent. Owen had regularly rolled his eyes at hunters that didn’t take care of themselves, especially the ones that needed to fight in close range, like slayers. Their bodies were the most important weapons, actual weapons simply an extension so running yourself ragged was a fucked up plan. Emilio had seemed like a bright example with his messed up knee and Owen had used to dread the thought of ever ending up in that way. Of not presenting a put together image of himself, even just for those who would be witnessing him as the last thing they saw before death.
Funny how little that mattered now during the single minded mission to sniff out anyone that had ever benefited from Rosel’s existence. Preferably before they caught wind of Owen hunting them down one by one.
Owen had made some semblance of a plan, aware of which of them would be the hardest to take down, wanting to start with them. The one he was currently eyeing had made that hard, managing to stay hidden. Until now. Maybe not great that his vision had gone a bit blurry once he stood up to follow the vampire, thank you last night’s head trauma and however many hours it had been since he’d last been able to stomach a meal, but no way was he losing this motherfucker again.
The vampire was blissfully unaware as it made its way towards a back door, Owen trailing behind. As soon as the door cracked open, he was on the vampire, using momentum to shove the bastard outside, forcing him all the way against the opposite wall with a resounding crack. The sudden exertion made everything tilt for a moment, limbs tingling which made any quick grab for his stake a bit delayed. The vampire’s fist dug into his abdomen, not directly into the wound that wanted so desperately to heal but close enough to force Owen back a step to keel over. And to notice that they had company. “Are you… fucking kidding me…” he gasped, trying desperately to straighten up now that he knew Emilio was present. It made everything a bit blurry again.
—
There was no reason to think that the vampire might suspect anything. Emilio had been following it a few days now, but he was subtle. He was good at doing things under the radar, good at making sure he didn’t reveal himself until he was ready to reveal himself. He wouldn’t be much good at stalking someone long term — he didn’t have the patience for that — but he knew well enough to know how to avoid detection for a few days. So when the door opened, he was expecting the vampire to saunter out the same as it had the night before. Maybe it’d see him and think he was an easy meal, but it’d have no reason to view him as a threat.
He wasn’t expecting the door to slam open, wasn’t expecting to have to push himself off the wall and duck out of the way as the vampire was thrown into the spot he’d just been standing. And he certainly wasn’t expecting to see Owen standing behind it, looking half a second away from keeling over.
Neither new addition to the alleyway noticed him at first. Owen shoved the vampire into the wall and grabbed his stake, the vampire punched him in the gut. Emilio just watched at first, right up until the moment Owen finally took note of his presence. (He was slipping. Normally, he’d have picked up on Emilio immediately, hit him with a snide remark. Normally. Nothing about him seemed normal right now.)
“You look like shit,” he greeted. The vampire whirled towards him, baring its fangs. Emilio took a step forward, grabbed it by the shoulder and flung it back against the dumpster behind him. Holding it in place with one hand, he turned back to Owen. “Fuck off before you pop a stitch, hm? I’m sure as shit not patching you up.” His own stitches pulled uncomfortably in his gut, but he carefully covered any sign of pain. For once, he was in a much better state than Owen. The unwelcome churn in his gut went ignored as he assured himself that this was a victory.
—
Simultaneously, relief made its presence known while anger and the memory of humiliation fought to squash it back down. This was just one vampire, Owen would have been fine, eventually. Maybe. The real curse of that night had been an overabundance of self awareness and it didn’t matter that Owen’s brain was running at half the speed it used to, bogged down by unhealthy living and a frantic attempt to re-repress old and new emotions - his mind was still managing stark reminders of his state of being. Like how little he actually cared about walking away from these fights or that it didn’t bother him that Emilio was inadvertently helping but rather, that the other slayer was seeing him. Especially in a state that someone like Emilio would have pegged from a mile away. What the fuck was it that Owen had spat at the man all that time ago? Corpse waiting to be found?
Catching his breath, Owen managed to huff a laugh at the insult, worth it despite the pain. “Scathing commentary from the wordsmith himself,” he groaned, finally able to stand straight without wobbling or needing to hold a hand to his abdomen. Talking shit was the only defense he still had against Emilio - he was at an obvious physical disadvantage right now and in an impressive turn, had the self preservation to not bring up any of Cortez’s touchy subject. The returning arsenal would not be pretty, given what Emilio now knew. So, counting on a return to detached insults and the hope that Emilio wanted to discuss what had happened just as much as Owen did. He let out a shaky exhale before speaking again. “That’s my kill.” It was mostly just pain and exhaustion but it sounded an awful lot like pleading.
Stake still in hand, a desperate life line, Owen moved a few steps closer to Emilio before pausing. The last time he’d approached the other slayer, it had been in a wild scrabble to sever a major artery or pierce his heart. Then Emilio was speaking and things always went to shit when Emilio spoke– “No more leash, pretty boy?” the vampire decided to chime in, banishing any further possibility of rational thought from Owen’s mind. It would take time to rebuild the walls once allowing Owen to stand under an impressive barrage of taunting without flying off the handle (if there was any foundation left to build them on) but for now, that was all it took to send him running towards the vampire, no matter that Emilio was technically still in the way.
—
He was a little surprised Owen didn’t have more to say than that, because he usually would have. In all the time they’d known each other, even before they went from being friendly with one another to antagonistic, the biggest constant was Owen’s tendency to run his mouth. Emilio was accustomed to hearing all manner of personal insults from the man in front of him now. It felt a little strange to see him so stilted. Maybe it was a side effect of how awful he looked, though Emilio had been in similar states and still managed verbal attacks without much issue. (Maybe the fact that Emilio was more accustomed to being in similar states had a thing or two to do with that.) Or… maybe Owen recognized that Emilio had more ammunition than he used to. If he brought up Rosel now, if he threw her name in Owen’s face, what would he do? Would he lash out? Was he capable of it when he was like this? There was some part of Emilio that wanted to find out, because there was some part of Emilio that revelled in the idea of blowing things up. They were in an alley. There was a vampire squirming under Emilio’s grip who’d kill the both of them if it got free. They were in the middle of a physical altercation, despite the fact that neither of them had recovered from that knife they’d shared in the barn. All of these things were true, and Emilio still craved more. He wanted the danger to be heightened, wanted the risk to be so thick he’d choke on it. No amount of self destruction would ever be enough. There was some part of him that would always want a little more.
He let out a sharp laugh as Owen staked his claim on the vampire, his grip tightening as he held the thing in place. “Looked to me like you were his kill. Guess it’s not the first time a vampire’s laid claim on you recently.” So maybe he was incapable of not pushing a little, even if Owen wasn’t pushing back quite as much. The anger burning through him was stale, and he didn’t like that. He wanted something fresher, wanted it to set the alley on fire and swallow both him and Owen in the flames. Emilio needed Owen to be easy to hate, still. He needed him to be the monster he’d been before, needed to erase whatever pity had grown in his chest in that barn, needed not to feel a pang of something unrecognizable at the sight of the bags under Owen’s eyes or the way he swayed where he stood. He needed Owen to be an enemy, because it was easier that way. Because if hating Owen was simple, then writing off the things he’d said a thousand years ago, when it was Emilio pinned to the wall and looking like shit, was simple, too. He wanted Owen to fight back because he wanted to hate him again. He didn’t want to think about the barn or the stake he’d shoved in Owen’s side before that, didn’t want to contemplate the times he’d spared Owen’s life without knowing why. He wanted a fight. He always wanted a fight.
The vampire spoke; Emilio had almost forgotten it was there entirely. It was little more than a toy neither slayer wanted to share now, his sentience almost forgotten by two men who were likely both taught not to consider it, anyway. He glanced back to it as its voice bounced off the walls of the alley, grip tightening a little more. “Not sure I’d call him pretty. Looks more like a corpse than you do, and that’s saying something.” Before he could make another comment, before he could twist the knife further, Owen was shooting forward. And Emilio wasn’t sure if it was instinct or a conscious choice that found him reacting, but the result was the same either way. He thrust his free arm out to shove Owen back, the movement a little too quick for the stitches holding his guts in, eliciting a small wince and loosening his grip on the vampire enough for it to maneuver its arms and allow it to deliver a shove of its own, trying to free itself from Emilio’s hold.
—
It didn’t take much foresight to realize it was always going to end this way. Whether or not there was a cocky vampire to fan the flames, whether Owen managed to keep a lid on his explosive anger for a minute or five – there was no scenario in which they weren’t fighting. Again. Emilio would never be capable of not instigating it, Owen would never be capable of not reacting. There was still an incentive to want Emilio dead, one that still revolved around some sort of protection, only this time around it was the protection of secrets, of shame. Probably a bad thing that Owen still wasn’t sure whether or not he actually would have let that knife bury itself into Emilio’s throat.
He’d start with the vampire, a much simpler object of loathing, and then deal with Emilio.
Alternatively, Emilio would deal with him and then both of them could deal with a vampire and some pulled stitches.
A small blessing that Emilio didn’t have time to reach for anything sharp (would he have reached for a weapon if given the time? Did Owen want him to?) instead using the momentum of Owen’s sudden lurch against him. Things never worked out well when they ended up on the ground so Owen desperately wanted to stay on his feet, arm reaching out for anything to grab onto before gravity conquered his very unsteady body. Emilio’s arm turned out to be the only thing available for grabbing, which might have worked if not for the vampire’s perfectly timed shove. So again, the ground welcomed the two slayers, Owen taking the brunt of the fall with a body barely equipped to tumble onto hard concrete, much less take on the weight of a full grown man. Something dug into his stomach during the fall, an elbow or any of the countless weapons on Emilio’s person - it was enough to knock the air from Owen’s lungs again, a precious few seconds he couldn’t afford with the vampire loose.
Anger, his only source of energy and really, sustenance, these days flared back up at the thought of losing the vampire. Of Emilio being to blame, as it seemed the other slayer’s sole purpose in life was to ruin Owen’s (except for the part where Owen ended up with a non-lethal wound instead of a punctured heart). “You fucking prick,” Owen growled, which seemed like the best use of finally being able to draw a breath, forcing his bone tired body to shove Emilio off. It wasn’t graceful, wasn’t even done with enough power to hurt Emilio in the way he had hoped but all that mattered was annihilating that vampire, to the point where Owen didn’t even notice sabotaging hands reaching for him as he scrambled to his feet, to the kill.
—--
He’d never squabbled with his siblings as a kid. Their mother wouldn’t have stood for it, wouldn’t have allowed such childish nonsense. If there was a disagreement, she might allow them to resolve it in training, might pair two people who were angry at one another up for a spar and provide both with knives sharp enough to settle the differences between them, but that was secondary to bettering themselves. They’d been expected to maintain composure in those spars, to act with purpose rather than pettiness. Emilio had never wanted to hurt Victor, Rosa, or Edgar, anyway (though sometimes he wasn’t sure that feeling was entirely mutual), so it hadn’t mattered much. Squabbling and petty disagreements had been for other people, children who were children and not sharpened knives.
But as Owen grabbed his arm and, intentionally or no, assisted the vampire in shaking Emilio’s hold, he had to wonder if this was what a playground fight might feel like.
He stumbled back, tripping over both himself and Owen and tumbling to the ground. There was a hint of bitter vindication when he landed on top of the other slayer, and he was sure to dig his elbows in when Owen shoved him off. The vampire seemed amused, though Emilio knew it wouldn’t be a captive audience for long. He weighed the possibilities, tried to determine if this particular vampire was more likely to make a break for it or attempt to seize the glory of taking out two slayers in a dingy alley. Based on what he knew about the vampire, he was willing to bet the second was more likely. It shouldn’t have come as a relief to know that he was in an alley with a monster who wanted him dead (or two? What would Owen have done with that knife in the barn, if Emilio hadn’t redirected it? Where might the blade have ended up if Eve hadn’t shown up when she did? Why was his name on that list?), but it did anyway. The vampire trying to kill them both was preferable to it running. It wasn’t even a contest.
But that wasn’t to say there was no contest. Owen got to his feet quicker than Emilio could, which wasn’t saying much. It’d take him a moment to get his bad leg underneath him, take a moment more to convince it to hold his weight, and Owen was in shit shape but didn’t have the same restrictions. So he was up sooner, and it shouldn’t have mattered, but Emilio hated the thought of Owen dusting the vampire before he could. He scrambled forward, grabbing Owen by the shirt and yanking him down in a way that allowed him to use the same momentum to force himself, somewhat painfully, to his own feet. “¡Eres un pendejo!” He exclaimed, moving towards the vampire again with a fiery glare and a stake at the ready.
—
This was ridiculous. Not that Owen could fully grasp just how ridiculous, too wound up in the pain, desperation and chaos of this last week. Also, the sheer loathing for Emilio. The vampire definitely seemed to appreciate it, at least enough to still be present once Owen was finally on his feet, hand once again going for the stake tucked inside his jacket. It should have come as some sort of warning when the vampire looked anything but frightened, shit eating grin still firmly in place. Owen couldn’t wait to wipe it off, wished he had the necessary energy to take it apart piece by piece with the amount of brutality he craved for. Brutality that Emilio seemed intent on redirecting to himself.
Owen was on his feet but there was only so much balance in legs that had been running on an empty tank for days. He barely managed to throw his arms back, keep his head from slamming into the concrete - Emilio would have loved that. Owen wasn’t sure that even unfiltered rage could prevent him from getting knocked the fuck out if he hit his head with that much force. It did however help in getting him back on his feet, incentivized by the vision of Emilio going after his kill. None of it mattered - that the end result would be the same, that Owen was in no shape for this hunt, that the whole thing stank to high heavens of overwhelming hypocrisy. Owen still charged again, incapable of just letting things lie (and really, what was foiling a fellow slayer’s kill when you’d been covered in the blood of countless hunters, anyway).
“Why can’t you just stay out of my fucking business?” Owen shouted, descending on the other slayer in an attempt to grab the arm wielding the stake. It was a flash of deja vu, trying to keep Emilio from killing a vampire, only this time his motives were much clearer, even if they weren’t exactly sensible. Neither were Emilio’s. And really, Owen wouldn’t put it past the other man to go three for three when it came to stabbings and he did not have the necessary reserves to walk away from this with a stab wound. A fact he was blatantly aware of before every fight these days, a quiet and almost peaceful knowledge, which didn’t normally bother him except he’d be fucking damned if Cortez got to deliver the final blow.
—-
Part of Emilio wanted to disregard the vampire altogether and focus all his attention on throwing punches towards Owen. It was the same part of him that was so sure that beating the shit out of Owen in a dingy alley would make him feel better, somehow, the same part of him that was convinced that the anger burning in his chest was just a thing in need of an outlet instead of the sum of everything he was. The whole thing was stupid, he knew. With Rosel out of the picture (he was assuming Owen had already killed her, though it was impossible to know for certain; he could have still been taking his time), the two of them should have been on the same side. Even when he disagreed with other hunters, he’d always felt a sense of camaraderie with them. There was no one else who could understand him fully, no one else who could look at his life and recognize it as what it was rather than trying to assign a more human layer of morality to it all. He and Owen had been friends once, or something resembling it. Emilio had been on that fucking list, so Rosel must have at least assumed Owen gave something of a shit about him. But the idea of standing to the side and letting Owen take this victory seemed so unfathomable to him even still. The idea of working with him instead of against him felt somehow laughable. They’d been friends once. Emilio had no fucking idea what they were now.
He knew he had no intention of letting Owen win this imaginary battle, though, knew that there was no way in hell he’d let Owen’s stake find that vampire’s heart when his own was gripped so tightly in his hand. The wound in his gut burned, the stitches protesting every twist of his torso, but Emilio was placated with the knowledge that Owen was going through the same sort of pain. He was more than willing to suffer so long as he knew Owen was, too. Wasn’t that what had driven him to yank the knife from his gut and drive it into Owen’s? If they were both bleeding, then neither of them was. If they were both in pieces, they could pretend they were both whole. They could shove and punch and taunt each other so long as they did it on even footing, couldn’t they? Emilio might have thought it a game if not for the fury burning through him.
“I was here first,” he snapped back, allowing Owen to grab his arm but using the momentum of his yank to throw his elbow back towards him. He was half tempted to drive his stake into Owen’s side again, but… he wasn’t sure Owen would survive something like that in his current state. And, in spite of the anger burning through him and the punches he was throwing, the idea of killing Owen still made his stomach churn. (Would Owen have done it in the barn? Would he have driven his knife down into Emilio’s throat if Emilio hadn’t stopped him? Would he have felt anything after?) “Shouldn’t you be on bedrest or something? I meant it when I said you look like shit. Wind’ll blow you over, if you’re not careful.” It was a taunt. It was. His voice was as sharp as the knife he’d shoved into Owen the last time they’d been face to face, his expression twisted into a snarl. It wasn’t concern that made him bring it up; Owen would hate insinuations of weakness just as much as Emilio did. That was all.
—
If not for the genuine hatred (the only plausible reason for all this anger, surely) and the painful reminder of both of them having been cut open by the same blade, this almost could have been like old times. The dialogue was petty enough, only now aided by real venom whereas before it had been teasing, even challenging at times. They’d fought over a kill before except the prize had been pride and bragging rights - now, there was only fighting to not be the loser. It shouldn’t have held weight but it did.
Emilio drove his elbow back and if not for the height difference, the blow would have got Owen square in the face. It dug into his chest instead and something cracked, some older break in his ribs - from when or who he had no fucking idea - trying desperately to heal. Pain radiated through his torso but it wasn’t enough to loosen his grip on Emilio’s arm, the only pathetic thing he currently had control over, making sure no one else cleaned up after his mess, convoluted as that reasoning was. Owen didn’t try to steer that stake anywhere near Emilio’s mass, wasn’t really trying to harm this time, only prevent. Was vaguely aware of Emilio not trying to impale him, either.
“Your concern is fucking noted, you piece of shit,” Owen growled back - speaking hurt, hanging onto Emilio’s arm fucking hurt and having his state of absolute fucking disarray pointed out was… well, Owen wasn’t focusing on that part. Jerking at Emilio’s shoulder again (was it the bad one? Not a good sign of his cognitive function that he couldn’t remember), trying to throw off his balance, make him drop the stake, fucking anything that would end this so Owen could go. Not home, that wasn’t an option these days, but just anywhere not here. “For once, can you just fucking not?” Owen knew the answer to that question and words truly were wasted on this situation but the silence provided opportunity for thought so stupid, pointless words it was.
It happened quickly, the flash of a blade visible even in the dim lighting, reverting Owen’s attention back to the vampire, the actual reason he was here. Emilio had just about managed to make him forget about the smug bastard by being an even more smug bastard but by some fucking miracle, Owen’s brain allowed him to take note of the new threat (the only threat, really). For a fraction of a second, he met the vampire’s eyes, caught a flash of something conspiratorial. Because he could shove Emilio into the blade now being held by the vampire - to an outsider watching this encounter, it probably looked like Owen wanted as much. Instead, he yanked that much harder on Emilio’s arm, pulled him out of range from that swinging blade even as the gesture made stitches tear at skin and fractured bones shift and grind against each other. That was enough to finally break his grip on Emilio, the need to hunch over and force an inhale, give a moment of peace to his battered torso greater than the need to not lose to Emilio. Just about.
—
It was stupid, and they were both aware of it. This wasn’t like in the empty apartment where Emilio had stuck a stake into Owen’s side, wasn’t like the barn where they’d carved each other open and mixed their blood together on the dusty floor. They both wanted the same thing here. The end result they were after was a shared one, was something they could agree on. There was a vampire in an alley, and it was dangerous. There was a vampire in an alley, and it had blood on its hands. There was a vampire in an alley, and it needed to be dust before the night was through. It shouldn’t have mattered who delivered the killing blow so long as someone did. It shouldn’t have mattered whose stake found this unbeating heart, shouldn’t have mattered which one of them finished the job. But right now, with Owen gripping his arm and his own hand holding a stake so tightly the wood creaked, it was the only thing that did.
They’d always been competitive, of course. They’d always bickered over bragging rights, even when they ended the night in one another’s beds. But the brutality that had replaced the lightheartedness the moment Owen pinned Emilio to that wall was a bitter thing. It settled on the tongue and filled the mouth with a terrible taste. Emilio couldn’t let Owen win, even if he didn’t know why. He couldn’t stomach the idea of Owen coming out on top, even if he had no clue why it mattered so much. But his elbow found something hard, and he felt a little too much give beneath the blow, and it didn’t feel good the way he thought it might have. He couldn’t let Owen win; the thought of beating him didn’t feel much like a victory. There was no winning in a situation like this one. It was a whole new level of frustrating.
But of course, Emilio would never let a thing like that show. The thing he liked about anger, the thing that made it an asset, was that it had an ability to cover up everything else. It swallowed grief and suffocated uncertainty, it eclipsed pain and smothered confusion. He didn’t understand the dynamic between himself and Owen the way he used to. It wasn’t as simple as it had been before he’d seen his name on that list. But when there was a fire burning in his chest, it didn’t matter. The rage would turn everything to ash eventually, and Emilio would tell himself he liked it better that way. “Not what? Be better at this than you are? Not something I control.” The pressure on his shoulder brought back an old ache — not the first time Owen had exploited it — but it was easy enough to ignore it so long as it meant pissing Owen off.
Had he not been so focused on pissing Owen off, he might have caught the gleam of a metal blade a little earlier. He cursed, but Owen’s position behind him made it difficult to move. Worse still, it put Owen in the perfect position to push Emilio forward into the knife. His mind flashed back to the barn, to Owen’s blade positioned above his throat and his hands doing everything they could to keep it from being driven home. If Owen wanted to finish the job here, he had a prime opportunity. He’d killed plenty of hunters over the last few months, and Rosel was no longer around to force his hand, but Emilio was no stranger. He wasn’t sure Owen needed someone to force his hand to kill Emilio, who he’d been butting heads with for months now.
So he braced himself, ready to twist his body to catch the blade somewhere nonfatal just as he had in the barn. If he was quick enough, he might be able to make it another gut shot. It’d hurt like hell, but if he managed to get home quickly enough, it probably wouldn’t kill him. Except… Owen didn’t shove him towards the knife. Owen didn’t even force him to stay in place so that the swinging blade could slice through him. Instead, Owen yanked him backwards, surprising Emilio enough to cause him to stumble as the other slayer’s grip faltered. The blade met open air, and the vampire looked surprised. Emilio imagined he looked surprised, too.
He recovered quickly enough, taking advantage of both Owen’s loosened grip and the vampire’s abject shock to surge forward with the stake, shoving it into the vampire’s chest with little fanfare. Wide, shocked eyes met his. The knife jerked forward — either the last reflex of a dying mind or some petty attempt for the vampire to take its murderer with it — but the uncoordinated attack was easy to knock to the side. Dust filled the alley as the knife clattered to the concrete, and Emilio whirled back around to glare at Owen. “What the fuck was that? Pinche pendejo, you think I need your fucking help? You think I want you —” He cut himself off before he could finish the thought, before he could chastise Owen for tearing his stitches to keep a knife out of Emilio’s gut. He didn’t care about that; if he repeated it enough, it’d have to start sounding true eventually. “I don’t need your help. Nobody does. Thought you’d have learned that by now.”
—
It wasn’t worth it. Or at least it didn’t feel worth it. Owen wasn’t suited for the role of protector, never had been even if he’d dutifully played the part for years, only it was to protect someone who ultimately needed no protecting. Just like the revelation at the barn, the confirmation of how little his actions mattered, the pathetic attempts at protection boiling down to violence and bloodshed. Now, as the last remaining dregs of his composure ran dry (they’d run dry days ago, Owen had no idea how anything was functioning at this point) he found himself quite unable to deal with the simple pain of a rib fracture. Not compounded with everything else, the last week bearing down on him quite suddenly, perfectly summed up with Emilio taking his kill despite all of it.
Owen couldn’t even be bothered to watch the actual dusting, one hand pressed against his side that felt like it was moving a bit irregularly with his breaths, the other checking to find that yes, there was indeed a dark stain forming on his shirt and growing. Should have done those stitches up himself (as if it would have mattered). His back found the nearest wall, drawing out a pained hiss as it jostled his unsteady ribcage and by that point there was no stopping the inevitable, as much as Owen’s whole being burned at Emilio being here to witness it. His legs gave out as a knife fell unceremoniously to the ground and Owen sat, one leg sprawled out before him, somewhat managing to press a palm against his side in a way that at least allowed him to breathe. And then Emilio was rounding on him.
It was almost funny - actually, it was fucking hilarious - which was a shame since laughing really hurt but Owen couldn’t keep the sound bottled up. A genuine laugh, if one took into account the scarce amount of amusement Owen was even capable of feeling, but one that was quickly cut off by a groan and gritted teeth. The taste of blood filled his mouth - goddamn lung contusions. Emilio had gotten what he wanted, he’d gotten the kill and managed to get a few decent hits in on Owen, too. It didn’t make the other slayer happy by any means, of course it didn’t. Owen remembered his own frustration at the barn, at being helped when he hadn’t asked for it. God, how he’d fucking needed that help. The current scenario, the one that might have led to yet another knife sticking out of Emilio’s midsection, had both been orchestrated and diffused by Owen’s presence. An absolutely useless addition, a point that Emilio was more than happy to drive home.
The gaping nothing in his chest gratefully reached for the harsh words, settling them someplace nice to wound and fester.
“Wasn’t trying to help,” Owen gritted out, a blatant lie but maybe one that would make both of them feel infinitesimally better (doubtful). “Need to… stop fucking flattering yourself.” His head rolled back against the brick wall, breaths short and quick to try and agitate the offset bones as little as possible. He just needed to catch his breath for a minute, give everything a second to settle, let the bleeding taper out. Then he’d be good to go.
—-
Owen let out a groan, blood spreading across his shirt, and Emilio grit his teeth against something he had no word for that curled in his chest. What did it matter to him if Owen bled out in a dingy alleyway, surrounded by the dust of something he hadn’t been allowed to kill? He’d been prepared to let Emilio bleed out on the dirty floor of an abandoned barn, hadn’t he? (Hadn’t he?) He knew he should turn on his heel and stalk off, knew he should leave Owen to either bleed out or let his wound get infected or be torn to bits by the next vampire who stumbled into the alley. He’d gotten what he wanted here. He’d won whatever pissing contest they’d conjured up, had been the most successful murderer of the pair of them. It should have felt like a victory. His only hesitation before leaving Owen to whatever fate might find him here should have been in deciding just how much to brag before skulking off.
But Owen coughed, and red painted his teeth, and Emilio wasn’t as good at this as he pretended to be. He’d been soft from the beginning, too gentle to properly mold himself into what anyone needed him to be. That softness was so much deadlier than the stake in his hand or the knives in his pockets, was so much more dangerous than the vampire he’d just dispatched. Weapons and sharp teeth would bleed a person dry, but gentleness killed you slowly. It had been working its way through Emilio for years now.
He wondered if tonight would be the night it finished the job.
“Shut up,” he snapped irritably, stalking towards Owen. “Just shut the fuck up, for once.” For a moment, he stood over the other slayer with the stake still in his hand. He knew Owen probably thought he was about to stick him with it again; he thought he might prefer for Owen to think that, thought that knowing he probably assumed as much made it easier, somehow. But nothing felt particularly easy as Emilio shoved the stake into his pocket and leaned down, yanking Owen to his feet and dragging him towards the mouth of the alley.
His apartment wasn’t far from here. He didn’t even live in it anymore — when he slept, it was at Teddy’s, and most of his things were in their closet — but he couldn’t quite let himself let go of it. On some level, part of him would always feel that the life he’d built for himself in Wicked’s Rest was a temporary thing. It was only ever a matter of time before he’d end up looking an awful lot like Owen did now — bloody, miserable, and desperately alone. In any case, holding onto the apartment would do him good tonight. There was no world in which he’d take Owen back to Teddy’s, but the shitty Worm Row apartment he’d already been to multiple times? That was no problem.
Emilio dragged Owen with little gentleness, teeth grinding together with the way the motion pulled at his own stitches. He’d probably wind up popping a few of his own before the night was through; he doubted he’d be shown any kind of gratitude. “I’m fixing your fucking stitches,” he said in way of explanation, “and then you’re getting the fuck out of my fucking apartment. And only because I’m not calling Eve to clean up your fucking corpse.”
—
It seemed an endless wait, the one for Emilio’s inevitable snark and departure. A wait that got longer still when the other slayer moved closer, lacking the usual bitchy comments. Owen did remain quiet then, not because he’d been told to but because breathing hurt and speaking was worse and there was nothing to say, really, if Emilio truly wanted to impale him with that stake. Properly this time. Only a pity that there were still a few undead left on his list, the one containing those that had played an active part in his manipulation. He didn’t really care whether they were dangerous or not, he cared more about the knowledge they contained. The way they’d looked at him, the shit they dared spout much like the vampire that was currently a pile of ash. Whatever - Emilio or another slayer would get rid of them eventually. Preferably Emilio, he already knew all there was to know, anyway.
The idea of some rest had settled quite comfortably by the time Emilio was… pocketing his stake? Owen’s face was the perfect reenactment of the one Emilio had pulled earlier, equal parts annoyance and surprise, when he got yanked to his feet. “Wait, don’t–” A pained exhale as the shorter man haphazardly helped him, rattling everything, making the world spin again. God, the fucker was probably enjoying this. Or enjoying it about as much as he was hating it. Owen couldn’t wrap his head around why, kept seeing flashes of a knife buried to the hilt in Emilio’s throat. Only it hadn’t found his throat and Owen was despicably pathetic so apparently, he wouldn’t be allowed to just catch his breath in an alley. Or die, whichever came first.
There was an unsettling amount of familiarity at Emilio’s words - without the bite, and the mention of Eve (would the bruises on her wrist have healed by now?), this was a scenario from before. When things were simple. Just like old times. The words didn’t make it past his blood stained lips, just as well since Emilio probably would have dropped him like a bag of bricks. Owen wanted him to, for the most part, except… the rawest parts of him, the ones exposed back at the barn and irreparably singed by the apartment fire, they craved this assistance. Or maybe just the company, Owen couldn’t fully make sense of all this want. It was too clouded by how little he deserved it and how little he wanted to want. All that to say, he stayed quiet during the short journey, not counting the curses and pained gasps under Emilio’s less than gentle hands.
“Fucking… hate you… you son of… a bitch,” were the first things Owen panted out once he had been relinquished from any grip threatening to jostle him further. Although the actual sowing bit was still left. Being in Emilio’s apartment was eerie, it was even emptier and more devoid of soul than before. Maybe Owen was just projecting. And then, once he’d caught his breath just a tiny bit better (not really, his state of consciousness a fickle thing at this point) but before he could swallow the words back down; “why the fuck are you… doing this?”
—
The walk to that shitty Worm Row apartment was a painful one. Between the bad leg and the way Owen’s weight against his side inevitably pulled at his stitches, Emilio had a hard time biting his tongue hard enough to keep any indication of the discomfort from slipping through his lips. He felt a stitch or two pop, felt the blood oozing out against his shirt with a grimace, mused that it was a good thing he hadn’t worn one of his nice shirts (one of the… three or four he owned that didn’t already sport blood stains). The only real solace of it all came from knowing that the journey must have been ten times more painful for Owen, who couldn’t keep the pained grunts from slipping through. Emilio was enough of a bastard to jostle him a little more than he had to, but not enough of one to drop him at any point. To anyone who might have spotted them on the trek, it probably looked as though Emilio was helping a drunken buddy home after a rough night out. The truth was something so much more complicated that he had no idea how to put it to words.
Once inside the apartment, he dropped Owen onto the couch with no attempt at gentleness, unable to keep the quiet grunt from escaping his throat as he did so. Another stitch popped, and Eve would probably be pissed about it, but the guy who’d stabbed him to make the stitches necessary was bleeding on his couch so he figured that was the least of his problems, anyway. Owen muttered an insult, which was just about the only thing about this entire turn in the altercation that made any kind of sense to Emilio. It was almost a relief to hear the tired attempt at vitriol escape the other slayer’s bloodied lips. Almost. Because if Owen was still spitting venom, didn’t that mean it was Emilio who was different? (But his name had been on that list. Hadn’t it?)
He waved off the insult, limping to the kitchen and opening a drawer. He couldn’t remember who’d stocked the first aid kit in here. Wynne, maybe, or Teddy. In any case, it was unopened. Emilio didn’t tend to bother with his own injuries, and most of the time stitching up someone else’s meant doing it on their turf instead of his own. He ripped open a small plastic bag within the kit with his teeth, depositing a needle and thread into his hand and grabbing an alcohol wipe while he was at it. The stitches were a promise of providing Owen with a little more sting; Emilio knew firsthand what a bitch it was to rub alcohol on a dirty open wound.
He made his way back over to Owen with the supplies in hand, faltering when the question reached him. He didn’t know the answer. Wouldn’t it have been easier to leave Owen in that alley? Wouldn’t he be better off now? He probably wouldn’t have made it out, he knew. Between the blood staining his shirt and the number of things that went bump in the night in Wicked’s Rest, a slayer left alone in a dark alleyway was sure to take his last breath against whatever dumpster his body was leaned against. And wouldn’t Emilio have preferred that? The wound Owen was bleeding from now had been put there by him, hadn’t it? He moved over, taking a seat on the dirty, beat up coffee table beside the couch, ripping Owen’s shirt open around the wound with a little more force than was likely necessary. He wasn’t gentle as he rubbed at the dirt with the alcohol, glancing up briefly to look at Owen’s face.
He didn’t intend to answer the question. It’d piss Owen off more not to know, and he knew that. And he could tell himself that that was why he was doing this, that it was all just an elaborate new way to make Owen angry, a new method at winning the game, but he knew it wasn’t the case. He didn’t answer the question because he couldn’t, because he didn’t know, either. Why didn’t he leave Owen in that alley? Why did his chest hurt at the memory of Owen’s knife hovering above his throat? “Why was my name on that fucking list?” The question was blurted out, just short of intentional, but his eyes shot to meet Owen’s for the answer anyway. “Was she fucking stupid? Rosel. What the fuck made her think you’d give a shit if I fucked off to die?”
—
Even through the hazy battle of not passing the fuck out, there was no missing the equally dark stain bleeding into Emilio’s shirt, along with the way his limp had become more noticeable. It would have been jarring, realizing how close to fucking death Owen must have looked for this to be the situation he found himself in, if he had it in him to care. Maybe he would have gotten up eventually, found a warm place for the night while his body desperately attempted to heal without the proper reserves but… Was it the unintentional assist, keeping Emilio from that knife? Just a stubborn need to not allow Owen to perish after a deranged act of heroism? The part of Owen that just barely managed to care was aware of a need to go out on his own terms but it seemed Emilio also had some thoughts on what those terms were allowed to be.
Owen hadn’t expected a straight answer to his question, fully prepared to tune out insults or sarcasm. The silence was the second to last thing he’d expected since Emilio never knew how to fucking shut up, a trait the two of them shared, so this was… surprising. “Finally learned how to shut–” His own jaw clamped shut, rubbing alcohol burning and searing its way through the wound and beyond, electrifying each frazzled nerve. The edges of his vision blurred further, gaze focused on the water stained ceiling as the pain ebbed and flowed, all of it in disconcerting silence that was only broken by his own ragged breaths. Death really would have been preferable to this disgusting display but Owen didn’t exactly have the energy needed to leave.
But then something sharp enough to cut through the pain, exhaustion and overwhelming sense of failure. Emilio’s question was even more unexpected than the one Owen had posed, even if neither question had a good answer. It was still nauseating, her name in someone else’s mouth, in Emilio’s, and Owen finally tore his gaze from the stained ceiling. Emilio’s eyes were angry, they were always fucking angry, but they also seemed to be searching. Like he wasn’t just asking to push Owen’s buttons (as if all his buttons weren’t broken beyond repair) but because he genuinely wanted to know the answer. Owen kinda wanted to know the answer, too.
“No fucking clue. Outdated info.” A blatant lie, at least the second part. Rosel wasn’t dumb and even though she hadn’t known everything, she’d known about the animosity. She knew the twisted ways of his heart, had moulded many of them herself, so there was no hiding behind a veil of hatred when she was the one surveying it. Owen couldn’t even begin to piece into words how he felt about someone like Wyatt, still a clusterfuck of a situation but arguably one that was less confusing than this one. The realization that he wasn’t apathetic to the other slayer had happened way back when in the dust filled apartment, where Owen had wanted someone to feel as vulnerable as he had during the realization that he’d gotten worried. Emilio had fucked up, almost faced the lethal dangers that inherently came with their birthright, and Owen had been worried and it had unleashed the beast created by Rosel. The physical distance and altercations hadn’t worked to erase what had already taken root, though.
Even if he’d wanted to explain all of that to Emilio (he didn’t), Owen had neither the correct words nor the energy. With great effort, he turned his head away. “Can we get this over with?” If his tone lacked all bite and strafed dangerously close towards pleading, Owen would blame it on the fact that he was barely conscious.
—
It was satisfying, the way Owen’s snide remark was cut off at the knees by the alcohol rubbing over his popped stitches. There was some part of Emilio that enjoyed causing pain. He liked to pretend it hadn’t always been there, but he wasn’t sure that was true. For most of his life, he’d lacked power. He’d been a weapon with no say in who used him, a knife in someone else’s hand. Hunters were monsters under the bed of supernatural creatures, but they weren’t nearly as powerful as that reputation made them out to be. They tended to die bloody, violent, and young, and they all grew up knowing as much. Emilio had no definitive count of the number of near death experiences that had stolen the feeling of power from his fingertips, but he knew causing pain to someone else, to anyone else, brought back the illusion of it, even if only for a second.
So he wasn’t particularly gentle as he scrubbed the dirt from Owen’s wound, wasn’t very careful as he threaded the needle and pushed it through the other slayer’s skin. His hand was steady in a way it rarely was, but the stitches wouldn’t be pretty. He wasn’t aiming for them to be. He wondered idly if Owen would pop them again and need them redone, or if they’d heal enough to scab over. Would the ugly scar left behind by this ordeal be from the stitches Emilio was doing now? There was something almost funny about the concept of both the original wound and the stitches that finally healed it being delivered by the same hand. He doubted it would be the case, though. The way Owen was going, these stitches would be pulled before the morning. The way Owen was going, he’d be dead long before the wound turned to a scar. Emilio wasn’t sure how to feel about the thought.
He wasn’t sure how to feel about much of anything now, really. He didn’t think he meant to ask the question, but he searched Owen’s eyes for an answer, anyway. Would it bring him some peace to know? That list had been on his mind ever since he’d seen his name scrawled across it, the letters looking unnatural and out of place beneath those spelling out names more important than his. In what world did his name belong in the same context as those of children who shared Owen’s blood, or beneath Wyatt’s? Emilio would have never put himself between Owen and the muzzle of Eve’s gun; Emilio had been hoping for her to take the shot. (Hadn’t he?)
But he should have known better than to expect a straight answer, even when the question was poised. Owen said the info was outdated, and Emilio wondered if he used to be better at lying, or if he just wasn’t trying anymore. He scoffed, shaking his head. “Christ. You’re so full of shit. What’s the fucking point, Owen? You go at it the way you are, you’ll be dead in a week, anyway. Don’t know what the fuck lying gets you now.” It was harsh, reflective of that moment over a year ago where Owen had pinned him to the wall and called him a corpse just waiting to be found. And the rest of it — the needle in his hand, the blood blooming on his shirt — was reflective of something earlier, of a moment in Owen’s apartment with quiet chuckles and sweaty hair. It was strange, this Frankensteined collage of the best and worst of them. It was a deadly chimera. He thought it might kill them both.
(He thought they both probably wanted that, just a little.)
He pushed the needle through Owen’s skin a few more times before pulling it through for a final stitch and tying it off. He cut the excess thread with a knife, the blade so close to Owen’s skin that he must have felt the cool metal of it. He was tempted to fetch a roll of duct tape, to slap a piece over the stitches, but it felt too familiar, felt too much like the old times that neither of them wanted to think about. “There,” he grunted, pulling his hands back as quickly as he could without being obvious just how little he wanted them touching Owen now. “You’ll make it through the night if you don’t do anything stupid. Which probably means you won’t make it through the night.” He stood, nostrils flaring briefly as the pain radiated through his own gut, traveling down his body to join the ever-present ache in his leg. “There’s a mattress in the bedroom. You can pass out in there. Don’t worry, I’m not staying, and you’ll be gone by morning.” Which wasn’t a request.
—
As much as the consistent sharp pain was contributing to Owen feeling faint in a way that would have been embarrassing if things were different, it was also the only thing keeping him conscious in a nice display of contradictions - this evening's theme, it seemed. The violence and animosity between them interjected with whatever the fuck this was. Not caring, nothing as simple as that - it was a much greater tangle of everything that made the two slayers similar and polar opposites. It was the quiet understanding that had turned into knowing which neither of them knew how to handle. So now he was getting shit stitches and what basically amounted to a scolding from Emilio Cortez.
Owen wanted to believe that the sharp words were only meant to deliver venom, that they only served the purpose of Emilio’s long awaited revenge, but there was no denying the evidence to the contrary. Emilio’s name had been on his list and for some fucked up reason, the thought of Owen’s death didn’t seem to sit right with the other man, either.
It was a good thing his gaze had left Emilio’s - it would have betrayed way too fucking much to a man who already knew more than he was ever supposed to.
“Bet’ya I can make it eight days,” he mumbled without a hint of humor, the only reply that felt even remotely safe, even if it too was a lie. A week felt generous at this point. The stitching wrapped up in what could have been a couple of minutes or an hour, time stretching and waning as the water stain that looked more and more like a pool of blood the longer Owen stared got blurry, and Emilio’s words lingered in a damning way. What was the fucking point? Owen was coming up a bit short on an answer.
Emilio Cortez was going to fucking outlive him, wasn’t he?
The pain of the needle had almost reached a sort of comfort by the time it stopped, humming in tune with everything else in his body that was broken and bruised, although a very different sound from the non-physical injuries. Replaced by what was undoubtedly a cold blade, Owen shivered, very obviously unbothered by the weapon’s presence. Unbothered by Emilio’s presence at this point, too, eyes glassy and half-lidded. He hadn’t even made an attempt to move - one that undoubtedly would have failed - when Emilio continued to take pity on him.
There was nothing he wanted less than to accept, the urge to self destruct still tugging on his arm, urging him forward. Any energy to follow it seemed to have been closed up along with the wound. Even getting to the offered mattress sounded like a stretch and really, Owen had a feeling he’d fare better on the couch even if only about half of his body actually fit on the damn thing. Something was trying to break its way free from his chest cavity, words aching to be spoken only Owen hadn’t thought of them yet. Instead, he just barely managed to shift his weight on the dingy couch and meet Emilio’s eyes (probably, everything was a bit dark and tilted).
“Still not a cuddler,” Owen breathed with so much more effort than the few words should have needed, head rolling back. Breathing wasn’t quite as harrowing as before but that probably had more to do with his brain desperately begging permission to shut itself off. This shit apartment, owned by a man who’d stabbed him twice in as many months, was about as safe as Owen had felt in a while, subconscious begging to take advantage of it.
—
The joke wasn’t very funny, but it might have only been because nothing was. He still couldn’t quite comprehend why he’d done this, still didn’t know why he’d brought Owen back to his shitty apartment instead of doing everyone — including Owen — a favor and letting him bleed out in that alley. Was it the same strange petty drive that had made Owen yank him out of the path of that knife when the vampire had nearly gotten him with it? He tried to convince himself of it, tried to force himself to believe that the driving force behind the shaky stitches and bloodied alcohol swabs was to ensure that when Owen died, it was Emilio holding the blade. It would have been easier if that were the case, would have been simpler if this was some bitter rivalry that would only end when one of them killed the other, but… Emilio wasn’t sure it was the truth. He could have killed Owen with his stake, months ago. He could have killed him again in the barn, or even in the alley. Owen could have killed him in the barn, too, knew Emilio's weak points enough that he could have forced the blade into his throat if he’d tried. He could have killed him in that apartment over a year ago now, when he’d pinned him to the wall and told him what a piece of shit he was. As Eve had pointed out, Owen could have killed him in the bar where he’d tracked him down weeks ago, could have had a dozen or so vampires playing backup. If this thing between them was about killing each other, either one of them could have ended it a half dozen times over, and they hadn’t.
So what was it about, then? What was the end goal, what was the inevitable result? They weren’t friends; Emilio wasn’t sure they ever had been, even at their best. They weren’t fucking anymore, either, hadn’t fallen into bed with each other for so long now that it seemed silly to think of the times when they had. They knew each other too well to be acquaintances. So what was left? If they were enemies, why was he throwing out alcohol swabs used to clean Owen’s wound? If they were destined to kill each other, why hadn’t they done it already? Why had either of them left that barn alive?
It wouldn’t matter soon. On some level, he knew that. He’d seen the road Owen was headed down. He’d moved down it himself once, not long ago, with his foot pressing the gas pedal all the way to the floor. It had been a miracle that the people in Emilio’s life had forced him to slow down, a testament to Wynne’s passion and Nora’s drive and Teddy’s stubbornness and a thousand other qualities from a half dozen other people who’d refused to let him burn himself to ashes. He didn’t think Owen would have the same. He’d spent the last year of his life alienating everyone who’d ever given a shit about him, and he was good at it. Even Wyatt, who’d stood between Owen and a bullet, didn’t seem eager to step in and save him from himself. Owen joked about making it eight days, but Emilio doubted he could manage it. In a few minutes, Emilio would walk out the door, and he’d never see Owen again. Maybe he’d catch sight of his corpse, if there was anything left of it after. Mabe Eve would call him and tell him out of some professional obligation, or maybe he’d never know for certain how it happened. But in this moment, tossing the first aid kit back into the drawer and looking over the counter at Owen still on the sofa, Emilio was sure of one thing: he would never see Owen Lundkvist alive again. And this thing between them, this hate or this companionship or this indescribable bundle of contradiction, would never be properly defined, because neither of them had the words for it. It was what it was, and it would be over soon.
He didn’t know how to feel about that, either.
He turned on the sink, rinsing Owen’s blood off his hands. He watched the red swirl down the drain, watched it cling to the metal and stain the basin. Someday, this would be all that was left. And someday was coming so much sooner than he’d thought it would. Cockroaches were meant to survive the unsurvivable. It seemed strange that Owen was the exception.
The water switched off, and he shook his hands dry as Owen made some pathetic attempt at sitting up. He wouldn’t make it to the mattress, Emilio realized, and Emilio sure as hell wasn’t carrying him there. He’d carried him far enough tonight already, had no intention of lifting him again. His torn stitches were already bleeding through his shirt; any attempt to lift Owen to the bedroom would only rip out the few left intact. Emilio rolled his eyes at Owen’s comment, turning the faucet back on long enough to fill a glass with cloudy water. He carried it over to the couch, setting it on the table as one final act of… not kindness, but decency. It felt like a final monument to whatever they’d had, both in the good times and now. A ratty blanket was retrieved from the floor, tossed at Owen’s face.
“Don’t think anybody’d want to cuddle you.” Not with all his sharpened edges and venomous bite. Emilio was much the same, of course, but he doubted Owen was aware enough to point that out. He might not have even been aware enough to recognize it, at this point. “Doesn’t matter, anyway. I’m leaving. I’ll be back tomorrow, and you won’t be here.” It wasn’t a question; it wasn’t even a demand. It was just the fact of things, a simple matter. Emilio was going to go back to Teddy’s, was going to drink whatever was left in the cabinet and go find something to kill, and Owen was going to die. He’d stay here for an hour, maybe, or two, until his healing factor kicked in enough to get his feet underneath him, and then he’d leave. He might fuck up Emilio’s apartment first, just to be petty, but he wouldn’t waste much time. He’d go out. He’d find a fight. And it might not be tonight, or tomorrow, or even the next day, but he’d get himself killed sooner rather than later. And in a week, or a month, or a year if he got lucky, Emilio would do the same.
But the important thing for this, he figured, was that they were never going to see each other again. Emilio had no idea if that was a good thing or not.
He limped towards the door, flicking the light off as he did so. He didn’t say see you later, because he wouldn’t. He didn’t say bye, because neither of them wanted it. When he left, he left in silence.
TIMING: current
LOCATION: The Leg
PARTIES: @vanishingreyes & @mortemoppetere
SUMMARY: with the sigils destroyed, emilio goes to take care of the leg. xóchitl decides to tag along, and despite his initial reservations, emilio accepts her help.
CONTENT WARNINGS: brief suicidal ideation
The sigils were gone. He’d gotten word not long ago, been given a head’s up to their disappearance, and that was a good thing. The sigils were gone, and the town was safer for it. Emilio didn’t know much about demon shit, in spite of his living situation and his relationship, in spite of the scars marring his arms and legs and the ordeal that had put them there, in spite of Wynne’s upbringing and his part in saving them from it. He’d dealt with enough demon shit to know it made him uncomfortable, but he didn’t know much more about it than that. One thing he did know, though, was that Wicked’s Rest was better off without a fucking demon bursting out of the ground. So the sigils were gone, and that was a good thing.
But the pieces were still there. The bits of demon sticking out of the ground, ready to burst free; the damn limbs that had started all this shit. To say it made Emilio antsy would be an understatement. As long as the limbs still existed, the threat wasn’t entirely resolved. Whatever was down there could still burst free or be dug out or something; his paranoia insisted upon as much. That same paranoia told him it was his job to fix it, and that it was the kind of thing he really needed to do on his own. If it was dangerous, there was no sense putting anyone else at risk. If it wasn’t dangerous, there was no reason why Emilio couldn’t handle it by himself.
(And maybe, part of him felt as though he needed to handle it alone. Maybe part of him was stuck in that basement, still, with Aesil’s blade carving into his skin and his blood soaking the floor. Last time he got caught in the middle of a demon situation, he couldn’t free himself from it. This time, he could do more. He needed to do more.)
His fingers twitched idly as he made his way towards the leg, reflecting distantly on the irony of it all. A man with a leg that gave him hell was taking it upon himself to keep a demon leg from giving hell to an entire goddamn town. Maybe Teddy’d get a kick out of it later.
He’d felt someone behind him for a while now. Paranoia made him a hard man to sneak up on, and it was running rampant here, insisting that every twitch in the underbrush meant danger. He didn’t act on it right away; if it was a rabbit or something, it’d be pretty goddamn embarrassing to spin around and accoust it. But after a while, he was confident enough that he was being followed to whirl around with a knife in hand…
…and come face to face with someone very familiar. Faltering, he quickly put the knife away. “Xó? What the hell are you doing here? You should be… at home, or something.” Somewhere safer than the middle of the woods, rapidly approaching a demon leg.
—
It wasn’t like she thought danger was sexy now, or anything like that. If anything, confirming that things she’d previously believed to be imaginary were actually real made it all distinctly less sexy (but then again, she’d never been too great at any of that, quite frankly). Xóchitl had heard warnings from people about whatever the fuck was going on right now, but quite frankly, she didn’t understand much of it. At least now she could nod with confusion rather than only expressing flat-out denial. So that was, like, growth, or something?
She also knew that she probably shouldn’t have been out and about, but she was bored being inside so much and for some reason that resulted in her wanting to go and stare at a giant leg. Maybe she needed to have her head checked out, when all of this was over. Because this wasn’t who she was. Not now. Not since that April. She wasn’t overly excitable and curious and daring. She wasn’t a recluse, thank god, but going out to explore something she didn’t understand and that might hurt her.
But maybe she had something of a death wish.
Which was also something that she didn’t like to think about too much. Though a death wish was more familiar than being all out there, daring.
Also, legs were supposed to be sexy, right? What was up with this town and making things that should have been sexy absolutely not. (Though, then again, there were some things that she’d come to realize could be real and were unexpectedly sexy, but this was not the time to focus on that either.)
Xóchitl had started to follow a familiar figure. Emilio. She should’ve figured that sneaking around him was not the best idea, but he knew shit. He was one of the people in town who she trusted most to give her real answers, and if he was out here poking around then maybe he was out here with answers.
“Shit, sorry!” Her hands shot up. “It’s me – Xó – Emilio, it’s just me.” She shrugged at his question. “I was bored.” Her face did bear genuine guilt. “I was – I don’t know. I won’t be too noisy. Why are you out here?”
—
Guilt flooded through him, the acidic taste of it sticking to his tongue and twisting his lips into an uncertain scowl. Xó shouldn’t be here. There were few things he was more certain of than that. Xó was strong, and smart, and stubborn, but she was also so painfully new to all of this. A few months ago, she’d had no idea any of it was real at all. He’d stood in her living room and told her as much as he could without risking overwhelming her (and had likely overwhelmed her anyway, because what did Emilio know about caution in situations like that?), and she’d reacted with enough shock to tell him she’d had no idea what kind of world she lived in. For her to be out when things were still dangerous was a bad idea.
Him pointing a fucking knife at her probably didn’t help matters much.
A hint of bitterness tugged at his limbs at her tone, at the gentleness of it. It’s just me, she said, because she probably knew that, for a second, he hadn’t known that. Emilio didn’t understand the things that went on in his own head sometimes. Xó probably did, with her fancy degree and all. And if she were anyone else, he might have resented her for that. If she were anyone else, he probably would have snapped at her. But she was Xóchitl. She was his friend — probably his best friend, or at least one of them. He couldn’t bring himself to turn that bitterness towards her right now, even if there was some twisted part of him that would always want to just a little.
He shoved his hand into his pocket, fiddling idly with his ring the moment it was out of sight. There was nothing wrong with letting Xó see it — she’d experienced his nervous habits before, after all — but he disliked the idea of expressing vulnerability when his heart was already pounding. “You should be bored somewhere else. It isn’t safe out here. And it’s not — It’s not about being noisy.” It wasn’t noise that had alerted him to her presence. That kind of thing hadn’t been a problem for him since the banshee screamed in his face while Xó was off in Ireland. “I’m… taking care of things. Doing my job. You know.” It wasn’t a great answer, and he knew she wouldn’t accept it at face value. She rarely did. That was the problem with people who knew you.
—
She did, admittedly, forget to breathe for a moment, what with Emilio’s reaction being what it was and all. But she hadn’t screamed and Xóchitl figured that was deserving of its own sort of reward, maybe. Not that she’d screamed exactly when Mateo and Wyatt had told her what they were, but it hadn’t been a good reaction. She wasn’t exactly sure if her reaction right now was good, either. But there were more important things to focus on, like the giant legs that didn’t make sense and seemed to even perplex the people who she knew knew more about these kinds of things. Which, if mystery novels and disaster movie summaries were anything to go off of, was a very bad sign.
Emilio was her best friend, probably. He was someone she trusted and felt safe with, and that was all before she knew all about what he did when he wasn’t private investigating. Or at least some about what he did – she couldn’t – and didn’t – claim to know everything, no matter how much she wanted to sometimes. She didn’t have the same sort of ego about knowing things that she’d had before. Now, more times than not, she felt like she didn’t know anything.
Not that she was going to go to therapy about that (as, if! right?)
“I don’t want to be bored somewhere else.” Why were they doing this in English? Yet, still, she replied back in what was neither of their first languages. “Okay, well, great. I don’t know, actually, Emilio, what with only just finding out that fairy tales aren’t so fake after all!” She huffed, pressing her finger tips against her eyes. “I’m not going anywhere.”
—
Frustration mingled with the guilt, and he thought it tasted a little better so he clung to it more than he’d care to admit. Xóchitl was stubborn. Xóchitl had been stubborn since the day he met her. If she weren’t, they probably wouldn’t have wound up friends, given how difficult Emilio was to deal with for anyone not willing to put in a good deal of extra work. Most of the time, he liked the stubbornness she exhibited, found it respectable. Right now, though… Right now, he wanted her to be safe more than he wanted anything else. And he wasn’t sure he could guarantee her safety if she came with him, wasn’t sure what trouble they might run into in these woods.
Nostrils flaring, he pulled his hand from his pocket and pushed it through his hair, curls sticking up in all directions. “I didn’t ask if you wanted to be bored somewhere else,” he retorted. His tone was sharp, voice a little too loud. He was on edge, but when wasn’t he? His eyes darted around, just waiting for something to come out of the woods and rip Xó to pieces, but nothing did. He had nothing to point to to tell her it was unsafe, no quick and easy proof that she shouldn’t be here. All he really had was the rampant paranoia haunting his own mind, telling him over and over and over again that they were in danger.
“Well then I’m telling you. Things like this are my job. It’s what I’m for. But you — you shouldn’t be here, Xóchitl. You shouldn’t be — wandering around in the woods, following me to — to fuck knows what. I have to go, and I have to take care of this. You don’t. You should go home. Please. Please go home.”
—
“Okay, and last I checked, I had free will, Emilio.” She didn’t want to get into a fight – or even anything beginning to resemble one – especially given her apparent tendency to go from zero to one hundred in no time when she was stressed out or overwhelmed. (Case in point, the whole Wyatt and Mateo debacle).
“What you’re for? Emilio, you realize what you sound like when you say shit like that, right?” Which was absolutely her putting on her psychologist hat, which she tried to avoid doing around friends, especially Emilio, but apparently sometimes that was unavoidable. Xóchitl would apologize about that later. Later, not now, not until she’d at least possibly somewhat figured something out about all of this.
Would she have rather been safe? Absolutely. However, she was opened up to a world of the unknown, and even with some answers as to what had happened to Mackenzie it wasn’t enough. She wasn’t sure if it ever would be enough – and that was a scary thought – because she was supposed to have found answers and then, because of the answers, found closure. That was what she’d expected for over two decades.
She wasn’t doing so great with the lack of full closure.
“What if something gets me on the way out of here?” Xóchitl crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow. She was being a jerk now, but she also knew that Emilio would put up with a lot from her. Something she was apparently very willing to test out right now.
“I think I should stay here.”
—
“I never said you didn’t,” he snapped, feeling bad for it immediately. There were few people who could so quickly fill him with guilt for his tendency of lashing out, but Xóchitl was certainly among them. It wasn’t a conscious effort on her part in any way — she never tried to make him feel guilty, and maybe that was part of why he did. Xó was one of the only people he knew would never snap back at him, no matter how nasty he got towards her. Tonight was tame, of course. Tonight, he’d kept things mostly reeled in so far. He wasn’t sure it would stay that way. He never really was.
She repeated his statement, and he threw his hands up in quiet frustration. “No, I don’t.” It was the truth; he had no idea ‘what he sounded like’ with the claim. It was one he’d heard all his life, one that had been drilled into him at an early age. His life was meant to be a short and violent thing. He’d already lasted far longer than anyone had ever expected him to, already survived the unsurvivable more times than he had any right to. He should have died a thousand times over now, in a thousand different places and at a thousand different hands. It didn’t matter what risks he took, what dangerous things he did. Any time he had now was unearned, was extra. But if he said all that, Xó would argue. If he said all that, she’d tell him he was wrong and some part of him would want, so badly, to believe her. And belief like that was a dangerous thing. It would kill you so much more painfully than anything else could manage.
In an ideal scenario, Xóchitl would leave now. She’d said her piece, he’d said his, and wasn’t that all there was to it? This wasn’t the most dangerous thing he’d ever done. This wasn’t even the most dangerous thing he’d done in the last month. Destroying the leg, now that the sigils were gone and the thing it was attached to was weakened, would probably be an easy task. But there was always a chance it wouldn’t be. There was always a chance something would happen, and he couldn’t stomach the thought of anything happening to her.
Except… walking back home alone was just as dangerous as following him to the leg. Maybe even more dangerous. She made a damn good point there. With a groan, Emilio threw his head back. “Fine,” he ground out, clearly unhappy about it. “Fine. You tag along. But if anything happens, you run, all right? Don’t worry about me keeping up, just get out.”
—
“Fine, okay!” She held her hands up. Except it was harsher than she wanted it to be – she wasn’t too harsh of a person by nature, and it felt even worse around Emilio. She couldn’t lose him – in any way – but he knew how she worked, sometimes better than she knew herself, and because of that she felt maybe more than a bit guilty for any bitter reaction she had to something Emilio said. That didn’t mean she’d change everything for him, but it did mean that she had enough sense to reflect on her actions.
(Or perhaps half enough sense – she wasn’t that delusional.)
(Unless she was. Which – not the time to think about this right now.)
He wanted her to leave and maybe she should have left, but she also knew that Emilio would do anything – including die – to fix a problem, and Xóchitl couldn’t let that happen. She didn’t know what exactly she could do to prevent it, if it all came down to things, but it was the thought that counted most… right?
“I won’t psychoanalyze you about it.” Now. To your face. “But it doesn’t sound great. Just for what it’s worth, from my side of things. Best friend to best friend.” Then, in case it didn’t get through enough, she repeated it in Spanish. In the language they were most comfortable with, followed by an, “okay?” If it were under most any other circumstance, she might’ve hugged Emilio, but right now anything even slightly unexpected seemed like it would set him off, and that wasn’t her intention.
She flipped her hair – perhaps a bit obnoxiously – “I’m good at running.” Once she’d said one thing in Spanish, using their familiar language just felt better. A part of Xóchitl also hoped that it would possibly put Emilio at even a modicum of greater ease.
They started to walk again, and so she let herself breathe just a little bit more.
“Is there any idea what the fuck’s up with the legs?” She said, voice low. “Even in like, basic terms, for those of us who still aren’t sure if they believe that mythological stuff is actually real?”
—
The sharpness of her tone washed over him like a wave of relief, turning the churning in his gut into something that felt more digestible. He didn’t know how to respond to gentleness, didn’t know how to hold concern. But the frustration in Xóchitl’s voice now? The angry look on her face? That made sense to him. It was almost disappointing, how quickly it was replaced with guilt. Emilio missed the heat right away, missed the way it burned. His eyes flicked down, and he nodded. “Fine,” he agreed.
She refused to psychoanalyze him — whatever that meant — and it was a little bit of a relief. He didn’t particularly want to know what she thought it sounded like when he said things like that, which was strange. Not wanting to know something was a new sensation for Emilio, who usually needed every detail of every situation around him. But… there were things he’d prefer not to talk about, and this was one of them. It didn’t sound great, Xóchitl said, but wasn’t the truth ugly, sometimes? It didn’t sound great, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t honest. Emilio was a hunter, and hunters had one job. Hunters carried a weighty expectation. Xó didn’t understand it, and he couldn’t make her, so maybe it was best not to talk about it at all. He shrugged, saying nothing as he nodded. It was better that way.
The switch to Spanish was a relief, even if he didn’t let it show on his face. He clenched his jaw, nodding again when she confirmed she was a good runner. It wasn’t a great compromise — his ideal compromise was, of course, not a compromise at all, but Xó agreeing to do only what he wanted — but Emilio knew it was really the only one he was going to get. “Good,” he said. “And I’ll be fine, for the record. If you have to run, I’ll be fine.” He could focus on fighting whatever needed fighting better if he wasn’t splitting focus to make sure she was all right at the same time, anyway.
Trudging forward, he let Xó fall into step beside him as they moved towards the leg. Her question elicited a small snort, then a sigh. “Not sure you want to know that,” he admitted. Then, because it was Xó and he knew she wanted to know everything, he added, “It’s a demon trapped underneath the town. There are people trying to free it. That’s what the sigils were. With those gone, I think it can’t get out, but… I want to destroy it, anyway. To keep people away from it, to stop them from trying again.”
—
She often wondered what her life would be like if she’d never met certain people. Not often, because she didn’t usually let herself know people well enough for her to believe that they’d made a significant impact on her life. That was all by extra-careful design, for better or for worse. Still, she found herself wondering what things would be like if she hadn’t been in that bar on that night and hadn’t met Emilio. Part of her answered with the fact that they probably would have met in some other way, some other time, but there was always the chance they’d just pass each other by. Or have somehow wound up being a one night thing (though that was more doubtful than them never meeting – they were both hot and good in bed and worked well – and yes, that was self-serving and centered but it was also true.) If she’d never met Emilio then she wouldn’t be standing here now and it was hard to imagine that.
Xóchitl liked to think that she could read Emilio pretty well, but even she had to admit halfway defeat at his reaction to her speaking Spanish. She wanted to say that he was masking his true and full relief, but that also might have been the more hopeful side of her – a side whose existence she sometimes doubted heavily, but one that at least seemed to be around, still, sometimes.
Whose existence was necessary right now, if she wanted to not pass out from sheer overwhelm of everything that was going on around them.
“If you say so.” She wasn’t sure if she believed him at all, but she also wasn’t sure if she had the effort or energy to say or think anything else. Which might have been for the best, in the end. Or at least right now. Which wasn’t going to be the end. She couldn’t let it.
“A demon?” Her eyebrows shot up. If it had been anybody else, she would have absolutely called them out on pulling something on her, but this was Emilio, and he wouldn’t do that. (Right?) He knew how confused and overwhelmed she was about everything. “Demons are real? What the shit?” God, she wished that she had something to drink right now. Several somethings. “Sigils – I – okay.” Xóchitl pressed the heel of her palms against her forehead. That was questions for another time. “Can I help destroy it, or is that a one-guy kinda job?”
—
There were probably a thousand different what ifs that could have made this easier. What if Emilio were quicker? What if he’d been able to get to the leg before she’d known to follow him at all, before she’d decided to trail behind him? What if he’d never let her get attached to him the way she had? It probably would have been far easier for everyone involved, probably would have been better. What if he were more convincing, better at pushing her away? What if he were smarter, could come up with some lie that would make her leave without argument? What if either one of them was a little less stubborn? None of those things were true, of course. They were who they were, and the situation was what it was, too. There was no sense thinking about how different things might have been otherwise, how much easier they could have had it. It wouldn’t help anyone.
“I do say so.” It was childish and stupid, but it made him feel a little better to snap all the same. It always felt better to snap, to rip things apart with his bare hands, to blow the fucking world to bits. Wasn’t that the source of half his problems? Self destruction was never as contained as you wanted it to be.
But it wasn’t exactly helpful here, either, so Emilio sighed. “Yeah. A demon.” Maybe he could have said more, told her about Levi or Teddy or Wynne and their cult or Aesil and the scars on his arms and legs, maybe he could have given her a fucking rundown on why, exactly, he knew as much as he did about something that wasn’t undead, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak about any of it, so he only shrugged. “Not sure. Was going to set it on fire. Kills most things, so…” He trailed off with a shrug, moving through the brush.
As they got closer, the landscape seemed to shift. The town had adjusted to make room for the intrusion, the ground had become uneven with its attempt to rise. It was difficult to walk on; each step was a little more painful than the last. Emilio grimaced, focusing on walking instead of talking by necessity. Something rustled in the bushes and he stopped, throwing a hand out to stop Xó, too. “Not sure what all could be out here,” he warned. “You stay behind me.” The leg was within eyeshot now — they just needed to get to it.
—
Maybe they were both too stubborn – too similar in eerily familiar ways. She wasn’t sure that she’d ever really get over that night when something had made them both see dead people. Some strange and contorted version of dead people at that. Dead people as they would have been then. Now. It was too much to think about even still. So avoidance was great. Especially right now, where it couldn’t be so easily paired with alcohol. Double up on one without the other. Or sometimes double up on one even with the other. Which was easy to do with Emilio – it was something of a habit they both fell into more often than not.
They were snapping at each other and all she wanted to say was that she loved him, that he was her person and so important to her, but that was for later. Xóchitl knew that Emilio didn’t react too well to compliments and she’d pulled more than a couple on him lately, and it would pull his concentration right now, probably, so it wasn’t the route to go. Afterwards, though? When they were both for sure alive and she’d convinced Emilio to shower with the promise of drinks and maybe throwing darts at something? Then she’d get him. Tell him how much she loved him and how much she couldn’t imagine not having him in her life. She only listened to him as much as she did because she loved him. Only gave him as hard a time for the same exact reason.
“That’s…okay.” Because what else exactly was she supposed to say, after all of that? She didn’t get it, and she wasn’t sure if she believed it, but she did at least know enough not to ask Emilio to explain all of this while going after a demon. “Fire does have that skill, yeah.” She held her tongue tight between her teeth, wondering how well it would work to light leprechauns on fire; then, in turn, wondering if that made her something of a pyromaniac (probably best not to think about that right now – self-diagnoses were something she’d gone through in spades back in her doctorate (and since) and she didn’t need to do more of that right now.
The ground turned less even and she wanted to point out that at least when following her best friend she had enough sense not to wear heels.
(But that was too much, and rude, and even if she and Emilio had snipped and snapped at each other, being rude wasn’t something she ever wanted to do.)
She did, however, walk straight into Emilio’s arm. “Sorry.” A headshake. “Yeah, fine, I’ll stay behind you. Not a bad view,” she said, trying to inject some sort of humor into a distinctly non-humorous situation. Which, stupid, but it was done. “Do I get to help light it on fire?”
––
Typically, holding a mirror up to Emilio lead to little more than broken glass and bloody fingers. There were few things he liked less than his own reflection, few things he hated the way he hated himself. The only time he’d ever learned to like pieces of himself was when he saw them in people who were easier to love. When Flora drove her heels into the ground and refused to be moved, when Jaime grinned crookedly and made a joke funny to no one but himself, when Nora hit him with some monotonous deadpan, when Wynne refused to take no for an answer, and now, too, when Xóchitl would not allow herself to be pushed away from something she wanted to be a part of. When he saw these things in himself, they were ugly. He hated how they looked, how they sounded. They were better in the people around him, he thought. And it made sense, of course. You could put blood on a canvas and call it paint, but it would never look quite as pretty.
That didn’t mean Xó’s stubbornness wasn’t frustrating right now, of course. That didn’t mean there wasn’t a part of Emilio that wanted to stop in the middle of the woods and waste time bickering just to prove his damn point. Another day, he might have done it. Another day, he might have decided that arguing was far more important than anything else. But there were demons involved here, and demons had made him nervous since the shit with Wynne’s family, had made his palms sweat and his fingers twitch since Aesil. There were demons involved here, and he wanted it over. He needed it to be finished, in whatever way he could end it.
He was grateful that Xóchitl didn’t ask any questions, because he wasn’t sure how he’d have answered them without giving away more than he wanted to. So few people knew of his harrowing experience in Caleb’s basement and still, too many were aware. Emilio would like to keep anyone else from knowing, wanted to hide the moment of weakness that had come with it. He certainly didn’t want to discuss it in the woods, with another demon somewhere beneath their feet. “Fire’s good for most things,” he offered, happy to have the subject shift, even if only slightly. “That and chopping something’s head off. But… don’t know where its head is. Just know about the legs.” And so, he’d take care of the leg. He’d burn it to ash, and he’d pretend it made him feel better. He’d like that.
Xóchitl agreed to stay behind him, and it was a relief. He pulled a knife from his pocket, handing it to her just in case. He doubted she’d need it, but he preferred everyone be armed. “It’s a great view,” he agreed. That, at least, was one part of himself that he did like. He shot her a smile that doubled as an apology he didn’t know how to say aloud; he hoped she’d understand it, anyway. “Maybe. It just depends on what —”
Something launched itself from the brush, earning a quick swipe from Emilio’s blade. It fell back with a hiss, and it took a moment for him to register what it was. And, the moment he did, he almost wished he hadn’t. It was a leg. A fucking leg, with a bloody opening full of teeth on the thigh. Jesus fucking Christ.
More sounds from the bushes, and the leg was flanked by two more, then another. They were dealing with a pack of these things, it seemed; the big leg was in view just ahead, stretching over the horizon to make for a strange skyline. Emilio eyed it with gritted teeth. They needed to get there. Now.
—
Nearly every time Xóchitl found out about something else whose existence she’d previously thought was impossible, she figured it couldn’t be topped. Leprechauns? Had to have been the worst. Then there was more – and then more – and now legs? She knew she’d get a headache if she thought too much about it. Or get dizzy and fall over (either literally or metaphorically, she wasn’t sure which) and Emilio should not have to deal with that right now. Or ever. But collapsing into a heap could come later, if at all.
He smiled at her and she could breathe a sigh of relief because that was Emilio-speak for sorry (not that she needed any sort of apology, seeing Emilio’s smile was enough of a win and it did happen to boost her ego just a smidgen that she was able to get him to smile as often as she was) and so they were all-good, chill, still best friends.
“Fair. I can’t think that I’ve used fire too much, but I’ll take your word for it.” She kept her wincing internal at the idea of chopping a head off even though there might have been some level of understanding – given that she sort of knew what Emilio did. It didn’t mean that she understood it, or supported it (though there was part of her who would have liked to see what happened when you cut of a leprechaun’s head – which – not the point).
Except then Emilio screamed and Xóchitl couldn’t help herself and she screamed too – a leg was throwing itself at him, and then more threw themselves out and she wasn’t sure where they were coming from or if they were going to stop – and she couldn’t get over the fact that they had teeth because how? Of all the things she’d seen this was one of the things she was least able to make sense of.
“Okay – what’s the plan?” She ducked down. Do I – stab the legs? If so… where?”
—
He’d been expecting some resistance, of course. Even without the sigils, something like this was bound to have some form of protection around it. Granted, Emilio had figured it’d be cultists of one kind or another, which would have been… complicated. Cultists were misguided, to say the least, but human all the same. And in spite of everything, killing humans wasn’t something that sat right with Emilio. Even hurting them sometimes felt wrong, though he was more than willing to do so when it felt necessary. Sentient legs with teeth, though? It was a more unexpected complication, but it came with far less hesitation, too. Slicing through sentient legs with teeth was a simple, uncomplicated thing.
The problem, of course, came from the volume of the legs. One or two would have been easily dispatched, but this looked more like a fucking army. (Or… the leg equivalent.) Xó had a knife, but Emilio knew she didn’t know how to use it quite as well as he did. And he had no idea what might happen if one of them was bitten by one of those things. Did they have the ability to turn humans with just a bite, like zombies and werewolves? Would he and Xó wind up turning into a fucking leg once a month? It wasn’t a question he really wanted answered. It was better, he figured, to avoid finding out altogether. That meant exercising a level of caution he didn’t usually bother with.
Xó asked him for a plan, and Emilio glanced her way with another grimace. He’d never been particularly good at plans; most of the time, his solution to a problem was to throw himself at it and hope it broke before he did. He wasn’t sure that would work here. He didn’t even know how to kill the legs, didn’t know where to aim to be most effective. It wasn’t like he could go for the head here. But Xó was counting on him to know what to do, and so Emilio forced himself to think. It was a new sensation.
“I’ll make a path,” he announced decisively. “Cut through them so you can get to the big one.” He dug around in his pocket quickly, thrusting a lighter and his flask towards her. “When you get there, light it up. We can deal with the small ones when the big one is finished. Maybe they’ll lose interest without something to protect.” Or maybe they’d both wind up being eaten by tiny legs, but at least the big one would be taken care of first.
—
Sentient legs – with teeth (which was neither a bonus that she’d been expecting nor one that she wanted – at all) weren’t something that she was sure would ever make any sort of sense. Legs being sentient was weird and improbable enough, but they weren’t even connected to the mouth, so where did the teeth come from? It wasn’t the time to analyze that, that much Xóchitl knew – that time could come later (or, ideally, not at all – but she knew that it would come at some point because she didn’t enjoy not having answers).
There were also way too many legs. She wasn’t sure if this meant that there were a lot of legless people or things running (or well, moving) around or if these legs were just existing on their own. Once again, she wasn’t sure which option was more horrifying. Each was quite horrifying in its own sort of way. But Emilio was one of the most capable people she knew, and so if anybody could deal with whatever-the-hell kind of legs these were, it would be him. Except that she wanted a more detailed plan than was going to be possible. She wanted a lot more than seemed to be possible – not just in this situation, but regarding so much more.
And she still couldn’t stop thinking about Mackenzie.
Always and forever. The sort of friendship they’d promised to have, that had turned into how often she thought about her best friend. Even if she had people like Emilio and Wyatt who were her best friends now.
One of the legs threw itself at her and she couldn’t help but scream as she grabbed the leg and chucked it as far away as possible (which was actually much further than she thought it would have been), before turning back to Emilio stabbing at as many of the legs as was possible. He really was impossibly brilliantly skilled, she thought, but right now wasn’t the time to tell him that. Afterwards though, she could praise him as much as she wanted. Though that all hinged on them surviving this.
She grabbed his flask and the lighter from him as he pushed them off to her. “Okay – yes, that works.” Because what else was she supposed to say? And she did want to help, even though she wasn’t sure she could be anywhere near as much help as Emilio needed. Wyatt or Mateo would have been better at that, but she had a one up that neither of them did – Emilio trusted her and that wasn’t an honor she intended to take lightly.
“Well, I’ve been a therapist for a pyromaniac before. Maybe this is just really getting to know your clients.” Her tone was drier than she would’ve liked, but the situation was more dire than she would’ve liked. Emilio kept going after the legs and she stood still for a few moments before she began to fit herself through any empty spaces left behind by either stabbed or distracted legs.
—
From the time he was young, Emilio had been trained how to fight. He knew which undead species could be killed with a stake to the heart, which ones required a more extensive destruction. He knew what was weak to light and what was weak to fire. He knew when his rosary would come in handy and when to leave it in his pocket. He knew that, when all else failed, separating a creature’s head from its body was sure-fire way to kill most things that were out there, because there were very few beasts that could continue to function without a head.
He did not know how to fight fanged, disembodied legs.
They didn’t have heads to remove, at least not in a way he could easily pinpoint. Was everything above the knee its head, or would cutting it in half only make it regrow like a zombie? Or, worse still, did cutting it in half run the risk of it reproducing from the two halves? (His brother told him, years ago, that that was how worms reproduced. Emilio had no idea if that was the truth or not. Edgar had been a lot smarter than he was, but also full of shit around seventy percent of the time.)
In any case, this was the kind of thing he was just going to have to figure out on the fly. He stabbed and slashed and avoided those sharp teeth as best he could, twisting and turning his body to keep himself out of reach while still trying to make sure that he was the most attractive target available to them. Xó took the lighter and the flask, and he didn’t turn to make sure she was headed for the leg but trusted that she would do so. His job was to buy her time… and to hope that she’d hold to the promise to leave him behind if things got too sticky.
He tried to push the crowd of small legs back, away from the giant one they were trying to protect. He needed to form some kind of barrier between Xó and this hoard, needed to make sure that she was protected enough to get to the big leg without a problem. She wasn’t a fighter, so Emilio needed to fight twice as hard. He shoved his knife into the nearest leg and it fell back, taking the knife with it. He cursed and grabbed for another, barely managing to pull back and avoid the teeth of one of the legs to his left.
“Hurry!” He shouted, turning to glance at her. Taking advantage of his distraction, one of the legs leaped up, delivering a powerful kick to the center of his chest and knocking him down on his ass. The legs began to descend on him, crowding him and making it impossible to get up. Emilio slashed wildly with his knife, cursing loudly. “Xó! Now or never!”
—
She didn’t want Emilio to die. More like, she wasn’t at all sure that she could even begin to deal with that as an outcome. Which was why she’d agreed to leave if things got too bad – but as much of a coward as she was, Xóchitl wasn’t sure if she could end up following through on all of that. Because if it was back in April – back before Mackenzie died – and she had the chance to fix something, change it all, then she knew that she would’ve, even if things swapped around as far as endings went. Mackenzie would have driven Emilio wild, and there was some sort of small amusement about that. But she wanted both of them to survive this. No matter how often she thought about no longer living, she did like (at least, for the most part) the life she’d made for herself. It turned out that letting people close could be good, sometimes.
(She just really didn’t want to be proven wrong about all of that.)
She couldn’t mess this up, because there was more than just her own life on the line. Her mess-ups would result in terrible things for Emilio too. She couldn’t live with herself if that happened. She couldn’t well live with herself if anything bad happened, but especially not if it was a direct result of her own actions. Thinking about all of this too much (or, really, at all) was becoming way too distracting and was about to make itself a self-fulfilling prophecy. One leg thrown away was something, but Emilio had said that she – that both of them – had to get to the main giant leg and set it on fire (or something).
Xóchitl didn’t think too much about the fact that setting something terrible on fire might feel good. That killing something might feel good. Thank god she didn’t have her own therapist to unpack that with.
She heard him fall to the ground and she was pretty sure she was going to be sick. Looking back, the pile of legs all on top of him. Something horrific and impossible. Could the legs crush and suffocate him to death? Why did everything always come back to suffocation? To the damned leprechauns?
(She knew the answer, she just didn’t want to accept that as the only option – or even as any option.)
She pushed her way toward the bigger leg, elbowing another leg that came after her – that kicked against her ribs and made her wince, made her pause for perhaps too long of a time (but she was human, she was horribly (wonderfully?) human) but once it fell back, she moved faster (take that, legs who’d never lived in huge cities! Right?)
“Then… now?” She called, pouring the flask onto the ground near the giant leg and clicking the lighter on, dropping it right next to the pour – a huge burst of flames suddenly bursting from the ground and she fell backwards, doing her best to catch herself with her elbows.
—
The legs were all over him now, snapping and kicking and biting at him. Emilio fought them off as best he could, but his position on the ground was a vulnerable one, and the volume of legs surrounding him combined with the uselessness of his own shitty leg made the act of rising to his feet far easier said than done. One of the legs stood on his chest; another kicked at his ribs. Breathing was getting harder and harder to do, and he let out a sharp, breathless laugh at the idea that this could be how it ended for him. Crushed beneath a pile of sentient legs wasn’t exactly how he planned on going out, but there was some irony to it. Between his own leg, which hadn’t stopped paining him since Mexico, and the nightmares he still had about the factory where Rhett’s leg had been cut away from his body…
Maybe, on some fucked up level, it made sense for things to end like this. Maybe the pile of writhing legs on top of him was proof that God, or the universe, or whatever was out there calling the shots had one hell of a sense of humor. Emilio, with his own dry wit and jokes no one else ever seemed to think were funny, could respect that.
So maybe part of him was ready for it. Maybe part of him had been ready for it for a while now. In the barn with Owen, with that knife hanging over his throat, or in Caleb’s basement with Aesil standing over him, or in Mexico when everything should have ended, or any of the thousand other times he’d been close enough to death to taste it… wasn’t there always a sense of relief? Emilio took a breath, shallow and nowhere near enough to satisfy his screaming lungs. If this was it, this was it. He just hoped Xóchitl got away… and that she’d tell everyone something other than legs had killed him.
But then, something happened. The leg on his chest jumped back; others did, too. A strange sound rose up from the crowd of them, something that almost sounded like a scream. One by one, they scampered towards the large leg now burning in the woods… and one by one, they went up in flames themselves, long before they could actually reach the source of the fire. Some kind of empathetic connection, he figured; he didn’t know the specifics. He didn’t figure they mattered much. What mattered was that in a matter of minutes, the clearing was empty. No more small legs attacking him. All that remained was the big one, now burning.
Emilio sat up, though he wasn’t quite ready to get to his feet yet. He watched the flames eat away at the leg, heaving a sigh. Xóchitl approached, and he glanced up at her. He gave her a nod as if to say good job, though the actual words didn’t quite make it out. Instead, when he opened his mouth, what came out was: “Is there anything left in that flask? I need a fucking drink.”
—
She wished that she could block out her hearing. Not that Emilio was making a ton of noise, but if she couldn’t hear anything then maybe it would be easier to pretend like nothing was happening. Like she was totally normally wandering the woods and setting giant sentient legs on fire. Which, even as she said it to herself, sounded completely ridiculous. But she wasn’t sure how else to rationalize something that was in no way rational. So trying her usual method was going to be what was going to have to work. There wasn’t another option, so it had to work. Xóchitl knew that was hardly any sort of logical way of thinking, but if fairytale and fantasy novel things were real, then what was the point of logic in the end, anyhow?
The legs were screaming now and Xóchitl pressed her palms against her ears, jumpy at the sudden noise. It wasn’t like any sort of scream that she’d heard before, and it made her skin crawl. She turned around, holding her breath, but the little legs were gone and Emilio was on the ground. Not moving much, but he wasn’t dead (she wouldn’t accept that – it wasn’t some sort of newfound optimism, but the sheer power of denial of bad things), and so she walked over to him and nearly collapsed onto the ground when he moved.
She wanted to sit down next to him, but given how fast her heart was racing, she wasn’t sure if she’d ever get up again if she did. Thankfully, Emilio’s question redirected her focus. It should have worried her, but she knew how he worked and how she worked, and so it was just a natural progression, a natural response. “I don’t know, but I’ve got a lot at my place. We should go there.” Xóchitl rolled her shoulders back. “Besides, I know that I at least need a shower.” She held out her hand, concentrating on remaining upright. “Let’s go.”
[pm] See, that's plain wrong. I've never missed a point in my life. LOL, there we go, you're doing the town a favor with that view <3 Are you sure? I can make my house a crying safe zone. Like, maybe I'll just grow onions so you can pretend that's what's making you cry. Everybody knows onion cries don't count. I say you mentioning Perro doesn't count, I didn't say nothing counts. You're the one missing points. I'm gonna starting booing you on purpose. OKAY, so... what I remember is... Was Regan paying you to find Melody? I defo think it was related to that.
That's so mean, they're people too. They can't help that they're 7 feet tall. But like, if you ask me it is a little greedy. The inch distribution system should be fairer.
Pft. Be serious :/ That's like saying I'm not the smartest person in the world, you shouldn't start the year being so wrong, habibi. Hey, I just found your resolution! Okay well, don't worry about it cause I'm excellent at throwing parties and I know they're supposed to be about the person being celebrated. I dunno, we'll see about that. [user is just trying to get him excited about his party via competitiveness]
You totally know what Mario Kart is, you're just ashamed cause you were so bad at it the last time you tried it. Like, I've never seen someone end 12th so many times. But also you were going through it with Nora and Wynne and I'd block that out too if [...] Do you think that things are unfair cause it's our fault Like Do we write our own I guess so :/
[pm] You miss points all the time. You're always missing points when I make them. Gotta give back somehow, I guess. I am very sure. I don't need onions, and I don't need to cry. You're always making some excuse for things I say not to count. I say something that's right and you say it doesn't count, every time. I don't miss points. Are you asking me? Regan has never paid me. [user has scammed regan out of thousands of dollars.]
I think they can probably help it.
I am being serious, and you are not the smartest person in the world. I'm not making a resolution. [user isn't entirely sure what this tradition is.] We'll see how good you are at throwing parties. I don't need to see who wins at the axe throwing, because I know it will be me. [user is, in fact, getting excited via competitiveness.]
Wait, is that the one with the cars? You cheated at that. [...] I wish it were different, too.
[pm] Oh. That's Why would you You know I'm not exactly Are you trying to be funny, or I don't really
[a lot of typing and erasing as he tries to process this. he doesn't understand what she means; he doesn't know what the proper response is. he doesn't know if there is a proper response.]
[pm, in Spanish] Because I'm hot. But fine, whatever.
Mine would be the top one, but I don't want to be self centered. I have perfect taste, by the way. What do you have against my not-maybe-boyfriends' asses?
Sure, we did plenty of work. Wouldn't have meant anything if the shit she'd had in place was real, though.
Isn't that what I'm supposed to be? [user has noticed posters, but is too petty to admit this.] I don't look at posters when I go around town. Busy looking at better things.
What does that even mean? [user figures he won't get an answer.] Sure, have fun.
[pm] Great. I'll hold you to it. [user is pretty sure eve is going to cut off all contact and disappear soon. user tells himself he wants this to happen.]
She thought she had him on a tighter leash than she did. She was wrong. Should have had a better plan. Guess it's lucky for us that she didn't.
Drinking. Stabbing things. Not talking about movies. [...] Says who? It must not be very big if I haven't seen it.
His ability, then? He's a dumbass, but if he's mad enough, he knows how to kill something that's not expecting it. Doubt his girlfriend saw it coming. Probably figured she had him under control.
Your idea of fun, maybe. [...] Could still be the second. What do you know?
[user replies after spending 20 minutes in her car, just staring at the red handprint on her neck before she finally wipes it clean. The collar of her coat is bloodstained]
[pm] Probably the worst monster I've ever faced, tbh! Embarassing, too, you can't tell the other hunters, I'll lose all my street cred. :/ I have so much street cred to lose.
Okay, well, then you had more faith in his ability to carry through than I did.
Also! It's a clip from a movie! Is the whole not getting pop culture references thing a hunter 'I am a weapon' vibe for you, or are you actually just super cultured and unimpressed by how mainstream all my references are?
[user is unaware of this, but bex had to read it and is sad so fuck you actually]
[pm] You know you and Jade are the only hunters I still talk to, right? [user changes his mind about sending this, but definitely not for emotional reasons. he just wants eve to think he has blackmail material, that's all.] Yeah, well, I'm sure you can figure out a way to buy my silence. For the sake of your street cred.
When you've been stabbed by a guy, I guess it's easier to figure he'll go through with killing someone he hates.
You could have just said "she's dead." It would have been faster than finding a clip from a movie. [...] Maybe your references just suck. Doubt anybody's seen that movie.
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