Down the Drain
TIMING: January 18 (Sunday after the Dalia Divorce) LOCATION: Emilio's apartment PARTIES: Talia & Emilio ( @vengeancedemon ) SUMMARY: In the wake of her break-up with Daniel, Talia joins Emilio for a drink. CONTENT WARNINGS: child death, sibling death
It was entirely possible that Emilio really was just inviting her over for some whiskey and shitty pizza. Talia had gone over with nothing more on the agenda before, passing the hours with stupid hypotheticals that descended into bickering, trading gossip, and baby-talking Perro. But she couldn’t help but wonder if someone hadn’t tipped Emilio off to what exactly had happened between her and Daniel. Which, as far as she knew, could only have been Daniel himself or Wyatt. Either way, Talia had spent the majority of the day in bed, in turns hating herself for how the encounter with Owen the night before had made her feel and hating herself for everything that had happened with Daniel (and she did mean everything, from that first camping trip all the way down). She was ready for a little sociability. If only to prove to herself that she could.
Emilio had promised “too much whiskey” (as if there was such a thing when it came to him) so Talia didn’t mind arriving empty-handed. She had made it a point to change out of the shirt she had gone to bed in the night before since it was one Daniel’s, which Emilio would likely notice. Even if that didn’t lead him to the conclusion that they had broken up, he would tease her about it and she wasn’t sure how to just walk past that.
As usual, Talia let herself into Emilio’s apartment without knocking, announcing her presence with a call of, “Here, Perro! Your favorite aunt is here!” She heard the slightly uneven clatter of three paws and bent to catch the dog in her arms. Daniel leaving meant Tree was gone. Talia missed the puppy in her own right, of course, but every reminder of missing Tree was another reminder of missing Daniel. So once she had scooped Perro up, she buried her face into his fur and just let herself settle there. Let herself hold something warm and soft and alive, that loved her unconditionally.
So much for not letting Emilio know that something was wrong… When she lifted her head away from Perro to meet her friend’s eyes, her upset was written clearly over her face.
—
He couldn’t quite put his finger on the feeling that something might be wrong with Talia. It was more of a quiet intuition than it was anything else, built by simple things like how quiet she’d gotten on public posts online, or the fact that she was no longer hounding him with hypotheticals about her ‘definitely-not-boyfriend’ going out of town when she needed someone to do her dishes. He had no idea what might have been bothering her, of course — Emilio was a damn good detective, but you couldn’t uncover answers from questions that hadn’t been asked — but he thought it might have been something. He’d considered a few possibilities, from the aftermath of the blackout to the new moon blues, but in the end, he figured the what didn’t matter very much. Emilio wasn’t particularly good at resolving problems, anyway. He was only decent at distracting from them.
Talia entered her usual way; knocking as the door was already opening, calling out for Perro long before she acknowledged Emilio at all. He huffed in quiet amusement as the dog shot up from his nap, jumping off the couch and running towards the door as quickly as his three legs could carry him. Emilio was a bit slower to get to his feet, his bad leg causing him more issues than Perro’s missing leg caused the dog. It took a moment to straighten his knee out, another to coax it into taking his weight. By the time he got over to the entry, Talia had already scooped Perro up into her arms.
If he’d had any doubt that something was wrong, it all evaporated now. The way she gripped the dog had a kind of desperation to it, a quiet grief that made his fingers twitch. He moved towards her quickly, stopping a few feet in front of her as she finally lifted her head up from the dog’s fur. Her expression was twisted into something clearly distraught, and his chest felt a little tight at the sight. The closest he’d seen to this had been on Día de Muertos, when she’d opened up a little more about her sister’s death.
“Come on,” he murmured, moving over to put a gentle hand on her shoulder and steer her towards the couch. “Sit down. I’ll grab a bottle.” He moved into the kitchen to do just that, grabbing two after a moment’s thought. He carried both over to the couch, setting one on the table and holding the other one towards her. “We don’t have to talk,” he said quietly. “But… if you want to, we can.”
—
Talia knew she had blown the attempt to appear normal as soon as Emilio all but rushed to her side. She wanted to shrug off the hand at her shoulder but it actually felt nice to have someone lead her along – especially when that someone was Emilio, who she trusted maybe most in this town she decided to make home. (And he couldn’t betray her, could he? Since that first night they had met, she had known he was undead. Even if she still didn’t know what exactly, she knew it couldn’t be a hunter. She was safe with him.)
Still, this wasn’t what she had wanted the night to be. This wasn’t supposed to be some sad sack night where she cried on her friend’s shoulder because her crush had moved on. Or because the man she had accidentally started living with and had accidentally fallen in love with turned out to be the one thing in her life Talia had sworn to eradicate. She had just wanted to get drunk and eat pizza and bicker with the idiot who had somehow become one of her best friends. And now she was sat on his couch, clutching his dog and only just holding back tears. “Sorry,” she mumbled, though she was sure Emilio would wave it off.
Talia wanted to laugh at the full, separate bottles for each of them but… Well. She had been drinking with Emilio before. Even if she didn’t need a full bottle to herself, only one between the both of them wouldn’t be enough. While opening her whiskey, Talia scrubbed at her face with her elbow, just to ensure no tears had fallen. “We don’t have to talk about it,” she said, once she knew her voice would hold steady, “but you’re going to find out, or figure it out, anyway. Daniel…left.” It was the first time she said it out loud.
It felt…stupid. She felt stupid. But she knew that even if Emilio did want to tease her for any part of that, it would come with a dose of real and true comfort. Talia took a long pull off the whiskey anyway, to sand down the edges. “So if you want to say ‘I told you so’ about me being annoying when he’s gone. This is your chance.”
—
Emotion wasn’t always something Emilio understood what to do with. His own feelings often felt like an overflowing cup that he didn’t know how to mop up after; he didn’t understand them, but he couldn’t do much to stop them, either. Sooner or later, they always became too much for him. It was what sent him into bouts of rage, sometimes; it was what turned him into a dissociative shell other times. Other people’s feelings were things he understood even less, even if he tended to try a bit harder to help with those. He could relate to Talia — to the way her voice shook when she’d talked about her sister back in November, to the anger with which she spoke of the ranger responsible — but the only solution he could offer her then was violence. And now, with a different sort of grief clinging to her skin, all he could give her was a bottle of whiskey. None of his solutions were healthy; none of his solutions were helpful. On some level, he knew that.
He shook his head at her apology, waving it off. “Don’t be sorry,” he replied. “Perro’s seen worse, anyway.” As if the apology was because of the way she was still clutching the dog, who was squirming and doing his best to get close enough to lick her face. It went deeper than that, of course; Emilio had delivered enough apologies to know when one came from somewhere deep in a person’s chest the way this one did. It didn’t matter. It was still unnecessary, because there was still nothing to forgive. She could come over and break down in his living room a thousand times over, and he’d always open the door. He’d always grab her a bottle of whiskey.
Talia opened her bottle, and Emilio watched uncertainly. They didn’t have to talk, but she’d still tell him what was going on. It felt like a show of trust he wasn’t quite sure he’d earned, but he’d take it, anyway. He pressed his tongue against his teeth as she continued, biting back an offer to stab Daniel someplace painful but nonfatal. (People never actually wanted that when they were sad about a breakup. He’d learned that when his sister’s husband left.) “I’m sorry,” he said, and like Talia’s, this apology came from deep within his chest. It wasn’t enough, of course; nothing from his empty ribcage ever really could be.
He put an arm around her shoulder, shaking his head. “This isn’t annoying,” he told her gently, shaking his head. “I’d tell you if this was annoying. You know that.” Absently, he thumbed at his wedding ring, stopping only when he remembered the whiskey in his hand. He took a long swig before letting the bottle drop to rest on his knee. “I, uh… I was with someone, last year. Engaged, technically. They asked just before I…” He trailed off, letting it hang. Talia knew his death was a recent thing and a sore subject; he figured she could gather how that sentence would end. “It’s not the same, I guess, because I was the one who left, but I was… pretty pathetic, after. You think you’re annoying, should have seen me laying on the floor. You’d have made fun of me, I think. I’d have made fun of me. You’re not that bad.”
—
The confession from Emilio was unexpected. Talia had clocked, somewhat, that there was something in his past he was avoiding talking about. Just a certain way he would pause in the middle of an anecdote sometimes, or dance around how he knew someone in town, or some supernatural information. She hadn’t thought much of it – there seemed to be a lot in Emilio’s past that he didn’t want to talk about, if Talia was being honest. Who could say how many of the gaps that he dodged in any given conversation could be filled in by a fiance he never mentioned. “Oh,” was all she could say, brilliantly, when he laid out the timeline. Not something from long ago, then. And just one more thing in his life that his death had stolen from him.
How long had they been together? Had Emilio smiled more, when he was with them? Were they still around Wicked’s Rest, one more thing haunting Emilio and reminding him of all he had lost? Talia didn’t ask any of those questions, of course, but she was glad that her friend had already slung his arm over her shoulders. It made it easier for her to snuggle close, tuck her face along his collarbone, and wrap her arms around his waist. “You’re right,” she said, convincingly but obviously not seriously. “I would have made fun of you. I would have pointed and laughed.” No, she wouldn’t have. Just like he wasn’t rolling his eyes at her and telling her to get over it.
“Did it feel… I mean. I know you were married. And that you loved her.” Talia had been able to pick out the picture of his deceased wife on the ofrenda, those months ago. “Did it feel like that, with your fiance? Did it feel like it was…different from the random sleeping around?” Because it had, for her, with Daniel. Even if they had each steadfastly denied the anything more of their relationship. Hadn’t she just been arguing with Emilio that he was little more than a live-in fuckbuddy? He hadn’t seemed convinced by that, but Talia had tried to pretend to be. Just like she had tried to pretend to not understand what Daniel was.
And if Emilio could be honest with her about this immense pain of his, she could do the same. Even if it was a truth he already knew. “He…wasn’t just a roommate. Obviously. I…” Did it matter that she had been on the verge of telling Daniel she loved him? Maybe it did. “I think I was falling for him, for real. Or had fallen for him. Whatever.” And now it was over. Now he was gone.
—
Sitting on the couch like this felt a little like trying to build something impossibly complex with no instructions. Emilio wasn’t entirely sure of what he was doing, didn’t know if any move he made was the right one until the dust from it settled. He hadn’t known if putting an arm around her shoulder was a good idea or a bad one until she shifted a little closer to him. He couldn’t be certain if bringing up the end of his engagement was the kind of anecdote that would help her or the sort of thing that would be taken as a dismissal until she accepted it. Navigating emotional conversations often reminded him of the day his mother taught him to swim by tossing him in the middle of the lake: there was a lot of uncertain thrashing, and it felt less like swimming and more like trying not to drown.
Maybe he was doing okay, though. Talia didn’t seem to mind his uncertainty, and hers was the only opinion that mattered in this moment. He huffed a quiet laugh when she replied that she absolutely would have made fun of him, knowing that the statement was largely untrue but relieved by the humor in it. It felt better that she could joke, even if those jokes felt just as unsteady as the rest of the conversation. “You would have been right to,” he told her with a tone that only feigned seriousness. “I was pathetic.” For a lot of reasons, at the time; he hadn’t just been mourning his engagement, but his death, too.
Talia’s question wasn’t much of a surprise. Though there were more people in town who knew he was married than there might have once been, there were still relatively few overall. Talia was one of a smaller number who knew about both Flora and Juliana, part of the smaller still section who had seen photos of them both. Emilio pressed his thumb against his wedding band absently, spinning it with his thumb. It was looser than it used to be. Sometimes, he wondered if Juliana would recognize him at all if she saw him now. “It wasn’t exactly the same,” he admitted. “I think… it’s different every time, with things like that. Every time you love someone, it’s different. It’s like… love redefines itself every time it’s felt, I think. Loving one wasn’t the same as loving the other. But both of them felt a lot different than the hookups. Deeper. More… well. Just more, I guess.” After a pause, he admitted, “Better.” He had liked being in love. He liked the way it used to make him feel warm. He even missed the ache that used to carve its way through his chest after arguments, the way Juliana would dig into the parts of him she knew were the most tender, the way Teddy would refuse to let him touch them when they were pissed. It had hurt, but it had hurt because he’d loved them and that was better than the emptiness plaguing him now.
He nodded at Talia’s confession, offering her a small smile. “Yeah,” he said quietly, “I know.” As much as Talia had admitted that Daniel was ‘a live-in fuckbuddy’ and nothing more, Emilio had understood that there was something deeper there. He’d half wondered if Talia’s denial was a more genuine thing, if she simply hadn’t understood herself that there were more feelings in play than just a sexual desire. He ached for her a little now, for the realization that she’d had something so briefly before losing it. It was something Emilio understood; it was nothing he ever would have wished upon his friend. “It’s okay if you were, or if you did,” he told her, giving her a small squeeze. “I’m sorry he’s gone now. But I think… You shouldn’t regret falling for him. I don’t think it should be a bad thing that you did. He’s a part of you. Maybe he’s always going to be a part of you. And that’s okay.”
—
It wasn’t hard to think of Emilio as a good husband, a good fiance. He was a good friend, after all. And she had not only seen but felt how good of a father he had been. He was devoted and loyal and she always knew she could trust him to show up when she was in need. Still, it was strange to imagine her friend as a lover. As a romantic, like she was, as someone who told her that each and every love she would have in her life would be new and different. But Talia had never known him alive, had never known him with a beating heart. Maybe if she had, if she had ever felt warm skin and a pulse when she pulled him into a hug, it would be different. Not because being undead made him incapable of romance – but because the dying had undone something so deeply within him. It had changed Emilio so critically.
Clearly it hadn’t altered him so much that he wasn’t able to see love in someone else, though. Because of course he had known that Daniel was more than just a hookup for Talia. Even denying it to herself, she could, in retrospect, recognize that they had been obvious with it. Emilio had been right to tease her about their weird public flirting. It was silly and she only felt a strange kind of shame when she looked back on it. Or maybe just embarrassment – all that, and for what? To be alone within a few days. Emilio was being exceedingly kind by not taking the opportunity to tell her that he had told her so, and it only highlighted, for her, how truly pathetic she must seem.
“This–” She cleared her throat and took a swig off the whiskey for courage. Talia knew Emilio wouldn’t look at her this way but she felt foolish and naive when it came to relationships and love. After letting the alcohol burn down the back of her tongue, she admitted, “This is the first time, for me.” There had been crushes, sure, especially when she was much, much younger. But growing up in an isolated werewolf pack with the same people since you were a child and a main mission of killing… It didn’t afford a lot of time for falling in love. “Juliana… Was she the first time for you?”
Being with Daniel had felt like more, like better. But– Emilio had felt that way about Juliana. And even still aching over her death, he had been able to find more and better again. Maybe the same could be true for Talia. Maybe losing Daniel wasn’t the great tragedy that meant the end of her love life. “I don’t think I regret it.” That was a lie, but only because of the specifics of their circumstances. She didn’t regret falling in love with someone, just with a hunter. “I do feel kind of like an idiot about it, though.” Another long haul of the whiskey, like she could wash the truth away. Wash away the part of her that Emilio thought Daniel lived in.
“He–” She cuts herself off, fidgets with the cap to the bottle before sitting up. “You didn’t ask why he left.” It’s not an accusation, just a statement. Just an opportunity for him to ask that question. Because Talia can’t bring herself to tell Emilio unless he asks about it. Maybe she won’t have to, maybe she won’t have to admit that she fell for the thing that killed her sister, the thing that she was raised to hate and eradicate. The thing that had been raised to do the same to her.
—
He considered her question, a quiet exhale escaping through his nostrils. “I didn’t think so at first,” he admitted. He remembered it clearly, being in his twenties and so sure he already knew everything there was to know about the world. Everything had felt so obvious to him, back then, like there was nothing anyone could teach him. He was a hunter; mid-twenties, for him, had been the equivalent of late seventies. His life was nearing an inevitable end. What more was there to learn?
(Of course, the answer was everything. But he hadn’t known that until later on.)
“There were others,” he said, tapping a finger against the side of his glass. There was a girl when he was sixteen who he’d sworn was it for him. She was a hunter, because that was the only option for him. Rosa could afford to fall in love with someone not born into their life, but only because Rosa was his mother’s favorite who did everything else right. Emilio could not be afforded the same luxury. And so, at sixteen, when another slayer family came to help them out with a particularly gruesome hunt and had a daughter a couple of years older than he was, it was easy for Emilio to convince himself it was love. They fooled around a little, and she left when her family did. Years later, he got word she’d died the way hunters always died, and it hadn’t felt the way he’d thought it would. Then, at twenty, there was a boy. He’d swallowed what he’d felt then, had known it wasn’t appropriate, but he’d written him letters for years after, anyway.
Romantic love was something Emilio only ever thought he’d understood back then. It wasn’t until he’d met Juliana that he realized he’d gotten it all wrong. “The first time I kissed her, I forgot all their names,” he said, smiling faintly. “Hell, I almost forgot my name. And the two of us, we didn’t even start off looking for… that. She was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen, you know? I figured I was just lucky she was willing to sleep with me. We hooked up, a few times. She started staying over at my place when she was in town instead of staying somewhere else. We…” He huffed a quiet laugh, shaking his head. “We told people she slept on the couch. We were just friends, right? Nobody believed it.” There were parallels there, he knew, to Daniel and Talia. Emilio and Juliana had started much the same as they had — friends who warmed each other’s bed and insisted, to anyone who would listen, that there was nothing more than that going on between them.
(Emilio would have done her dishes, too. Maybe that was why he’d locked in on that so thoroughly.)
“It took me a while to realize it, but… Yeah. Yeah, she was the first time I ever really felt it. And there’s… It sticks with you, I think. The first time. It’s always going to stick with you. Be a part of you.” Daniel was a part of Talia the same way Juliana was a part of Emilio. And he wasn’t gone in the same way she was, but Talia was mourning all the same. The least Emilio could do was be there for Talia in the aftermath, wasn’t it? The way Rhett tried to be there for him after Juliana, the way he hadn’t let anyone be there for him after Teddy. Maybe he was a hypocrite for it, but he didn’t want to let Talia do it alone.
He glanced up, pressing his tongue against his teeth thoughtfully. He had a few guesses as to why Daniel might have left, of course. He thought of the axe in Daniel’s truck, the gleam of the metal. He thought of the skill with which the ranger moved against the avalance later, the quiet thrill dancing behind his eyes. You couldn’t really separate a hunter from what they were after they’d been raised in it. Maybe you couldn’t separate them from it even if they hadn’t. Maybe all hunters were built the same, even if they didn’t want to be. Maybe part of him had known the first time he’d seen Daniel in Talia’s house and made the connection that it was going to end this way. And maybe he hadn’t. Maybe, somewhere deep in the bottom of his chest, Emilio was still the man who’d kissed his brother’s best friend for the first time and mapped their entire life out between their shared breaths. Maybe the part of him that remembered rushing to the altar, late and sticky with sweat and a little bit of blood staining the soles of his shoes but grinning all the same was incapable of viewing the world without that hazy lens of romance despite the fact that romance had never once worked out for him. Talia was a good person. She deserved a happy ending. Maybe, on some level, Emilio had thought she’d find that with Daniel. In spite of everything.
Releasing another quiet breath, he shook his head. “It doesn’t matter why he left,” he decided, the statement carrying an air of finality. “I don’t care about that. Tell me if you want to tell me, don’t if you don’t. What matters to me is you. I care how you’re doing, if you’re okay. That’s all. If you want to talk about it, we can talk about it. If you don’t, we can drink. Whatever you need, Talia. Whatever I can do. I’m here. I’m here for you.”
—
Emilio didn’t have to point out the similarities between his and Juliana’s relationship and Daniel and Talia’s. At least in those sketchy, undefined beginnings, it was obvious. Would she and Daniel ever had made it to marriage, though? To a child between them? Not likely. She would have broken before then, if Daniel hadn’t, told him what she really was and what she did. Still, it was almost comforting to know she had walked in the same footsteps as her friend, just a decade and change later. One night spent together turning into two turning into the whole next day turning into, why would you leave? Jade thinking Daniel was sleeping on the couch this whole time. Pretending it was about the camper not having heat and about him warming her bed and doing her chores.
But it also hadn’t been the same as Emilio’s relationship and it would be insulting of Talia to even try to compare them. Juliana and Emilio had built a life, a family together, married with little Flora between them. Talia had had a few months with Daniel and in those they hadn’t even been able to call it what it was, what they were. And while she didn’t know the details of all that happened, she could make an educated guess. Whatever had taken Juliana and Flora from Emilio had been violent and tragic and had put their pictures on his ofrenda. Daniel had just walked out of Talia’s house– Easier, even: she had kicked him out.
Her heartbreak was paltry compared to his and so it had to be the whiskey that was making her tears fall faster. Or maybe it was the thought of how much Emilio had lost in his life and still he was comforting her with a shoulder and his dog and a bottle of whiskey. (Whiskey, right. She took another long pull, wincing.) Or maybe, maybe, Talia was just the exact kind of girl who cried over a break-up. Why wouldn’t she be, given how deeply she enjoyed those romance movies? How intently she watched Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers literally dance around each other until they finally kissed, with the music swelling as the curtain closed. It didn’t matter that she was raised how she was raised, to ignore any and all pain, to be nothing but a soldier made of steel, made of hardwood, grown from the very roots of a legacy, watered with the blood of those warrior wolves who came before her. No, none of that mattered. She was just a girl who cried over a boy.
(Except, it wasn’t just a break-up. It was the centuries- and generations-deep wound of rangers killing werewolves and Talia’s pack killing hunters. It was the decade’s old grief of Tabitha being dead. And it was the few days’ worth of knowledge that her sister would have borne no sympathy for her in this moment.)
“Tabitha would hate me.” It gasped out of Talia, between troubled breaths, between the gaps of her fingers as she scrubbed at her eyes over and over, still trying to erase the reality of her tears. Tabitha would hate her for falling in love with Daniel, and she would hate her for crying over him now. “She was my best friend and she wouldn’t even–” It sunk away, whatever she was going to say next, drowned in the whiskey and her quiet crying. Not quiet enough, as she turned her head to muffle herself with Emilio’s shoulder.
That, it turned out, was what she needed him to do for her. At least in that moment. She needed Emilio to hold her and let her cry into shirt. Because of Daniel, and not because of Daniel. Because her sister was dead, and not because of that. For her friend, who had lost two loves, and for herself, because Daniel was gone and her sister was dead and the truth of hating hunters that she had always planted herself upon was suddenly not so solid a truth any longer.
It was only a few minutes before she pulled away, swearing a streak under her breath and finally able to scrub the tears away. “Fucking hell. Sorry.” He would tell her to shut up again but it had to be said. Another drink off her bottle and it was already halfway gone. “Just.” A snuffle, another harsh hatch across her eyes with her wrist. “It doesn’t matter why he left,” she echoed, grateful to have that handhold to latch onto. “I’m…okay. Or I will be. Whatever. This…” The hand holding the bottle arched out, indicating the whole of her life, “has just been one fucked up distraction, really. I have other shit to focus on.”
If she focused, maybe then she could rebuild that foundation into something sturdier. She was Talia Shaw and she killed hunters, she hunted hunters. The hunter who had murdered her sister was here in town and had been allowed to live too long.
Tonight, though, she would just get drunk with Emilio.
—
Tabitha would hate me. The words seemed to reverberate through his head, like shrapnel from an explosion digging into every inch of skin and ripping the body to shreds. He thought of his own sister at his door, just a week before she died with a bottle of whiskey in her hand. Her son was in the same shed that had Emilio, even now, uncomfortable in tight spaces. She had not known whether or not he’d be okay come morning, and she’d been afraid. It was one of the only times he’d ever seen Rosa like that — not just nervous, but anxious. She had loved her son just as much as Emilio had loved his daughter, but she’d put him in that shed, anyway. She had loved Emilio, too, but she had still told their mother what he was planning. He thought about her words when she’d left that day, furious and trembling. I wish you had died instead of Victor.
Had his sister hated him? He wondered, sometimes. He knew she had loved him, but he knew that love and hate were never quite as mutually exclusive as one might assume. You could love someone and hate them still. You could want to protect a child, and still lock them in a shed with something four times their size and nothing but a small blade to protect them. You could want what was best for someone even if what was best meant their blood on the floor.
Talia’s statement — that Tabitha would have hated her — told Emilio she probably knew what Daniel was. He wondered if it meant she’d known it all the while, if she’d always been just as aware of him as he was of her and had fallen for him, anyway. He thought, again, of Juliana. He thought of how much he’d loved her, of the fire that had burned through him every time she came to town even in the days when they swore they were just friends. If she were here now, if she saw him like this — empty chest, dead eyes, sharp claws and deadly teeth — would she love him still? If she’d been turned instead of killed, if she’d found him years later with red eyes and bloody fangs and set off the senses he no longer had, would he have reached for a stake or taken her hand?
He imagined a world where she was here now, imagined a universe where he met her only after one of them was already the thing the other was meant to hate. Even then, he couldn’t imagine not loving her. Even then, he couldn’t imagine turning her away. Talia knew what Daniel was, and she loved him anyway. Wasn’t that what love was, in the end? Holding tight to every part of someone, even the parts you were meant to reject? She loved him, even now. If she didn’t, it wouldn’t hurt this much. Emilio knew that. Better than anyone, he thought.
“She could never hate you more than she loved you,” he told her quietly, thinking again of Rosa’s bitter fury. Maybe she’d hated him, but she’d loved him, too. “That’s… I think that’s what sisters are. People who love you, even when they hate you. That’s how mine was.” He thought of the ofrenda, of Tabitha’s picture on it. If not for the age-old rivalry between hunters and the supernatural, maybe she and Rosa would have been friends.
(If not for the age-old rivalry between hunters and the supernatural, maybe they’d both still be alive.)
He rubbed small circles in her back as she cried, his shirt soaking up tears he wasn’t sure what to do with. He wondered if it felt strange to her, being with him like this. He’d always thought his shoulder too sharp to make a decent thing to cry on, but Talia didn’t seem to mind it. “Fuck sorry,” he replied, shaking his head. “If this is what you need to do, do it. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
He pressed his tongue against his teeth as she called it all a distraction. He didn’t need to ask what it was a distraction from. Something twisted in his gut, and he thought of the conversation he’d had with Jade about killing hunters but quickly pushed it to the side. This was his friend, sitting on his couch with tears staining her cheeks. There was nothing that mattered more than that.
“It’ll hurt for a while,” he told her quietly, thinking of the days he’d spent curled up on the mattress in his room, ignoring the vibrations of his phone until the battery finally died. How many times had Teddy tried calling him? Eventually, the messages went from worried to upset to angry, and that had felt easier. He’d always understood rage far better than he understood anything else. That was what had landed him in this situation to begin with. “It’ll feel heavy. And it’s… I’m not going to tell you it’ll go away. I think it stays in your ribs forever. She’s still in mine.” Teddy, too. “But… you adapt, I guess. It makes a notch for itself so it stops moving around as much. You still feel it, but it’s not all you feel. He’s in you. Nothing’s going to change that. But you get to choose how you grow around it.” He smiled faintly, raising his brows. “You’ll probably do a better job than I did.”
—
It felt…good to have someone comfort her. Most of her life had been absent of any soft touch, of anyone rubbing her back while she cried (before she stopped crying altogether). Emilio, for all his own rough edges and minefields, was someone Talia had come to trust with her life. When she had last cried before him, telling him what happened to Tabitha, she had stood a few feet away from him, in the center of this very room, and hadn’t let him comfort her. Hadn’t let herself go, either, in this manner. Even that had been catharsis, to allow herself to just cry and cry, to purge the poison from her like saline washing a wound.
(Daniel, too, had rubbed her back. She hadn’t cried, but her eyes had welled as she told him about Tabitha. And before that, tending her when she was injured in the aftermath of Metzli and Hazel, he had held her gently. Hadn’t looked at her like a soldier, or even like an injured friend. Talia had pretended not to see it at the time, but she knew his eyes held the deep-seated need to protect her. Not just to comfort her, but to keep her from needing comfort in the future. And she had fallen for it. But when you haven’t tasted liquor before, you’ll gorge yourself on any cheap swill and mistake it for top-shelf.)
Talia didn’t argue with Emilio but she wasn’t sure she could believe him. Maybe his sister had loved him more than she hated him, but… But he and his siblings hadn’t been raised the way Talia and hers had been. To view any vulnerability as a weakness, to hate something else so much that even if their own kin aligned themselves with that thing, you were to hate them too. The truth was, she didn’t just know that Tabitha would hate her for what happened. Her sister would have killed her for it, too. It made her a liability, a weak link, and they couldn’t afford any of those in their mission. It was too important.
But she could pretend to believe him. What did it matter? She had already sullied Tabitha’s memory. She could lie about it too, just to herself. Talia smiled as she pulled away from Emilio’s embrace. After drying her face off, she leaned close to press a kiss into his forehead. Lingering there, she told him, “You’re hard not to love. Even when I hate you.” It hadn’t been too long ago that she told Wyatt for the first time that she loved him. And here, she could tell Emilio that too. Maybe it was being so catastrophically wrong about thinking she loved Daniel that cleared the rest of it up for her. Of course, she loved Emilio.
Settling back down against his chest, she burrowed close and tucked her legs over his. This kind of embrace was more common between her and Wyatt, but it made her feel safe, protected, with her head notched under Emilio’s chin. “Thanks,” she said, again. Again, certain that he would wave it off. One of the hands around his middle drew back to her, rubbed at the spot between her ribs, at the base of her sternum. She was reminded of the bullet that had torn through her leg. The initial pain and then the secondary when the shrapnel was dug out. The burn and ache that had lasted for days. This felt different. Not like a foreign object but like an absence. A pitchy, gangrenous abscess. Something that would take cleansing, first, and then packing and healing before she could decide how to grow around it.
Maybe this pit would sit close to the one her grief for Tabitha had gouged into her. Maybe they could be like twin reminders of betrayal, of what her true mission was, of what happened when you lost sight of it.
(Talia knew what she wanted to do, to grow around it, but she wouldn’t tell Emilio. Not yet. She wanted to tend to it herself. Poke and prod at the plan to finally kill the ranger who had killed her sister.)
“No matter what kind of job you did at it, I’m glad I have you with me,” Talia told him, serious. “Now let’s fucking…not talk about that anymore. I was promised pizza. But I’m ordering because I’m sure as hell not going to end up with worms as a topping.”
—
You’re not hard to love. Even when I hate you. Coming from anyone else, Emilio would have found the words impossible to believe. He’d known all his life that there was something wrong with him. While his siblings found it easy to turn off the parts of themselves that asked questions, Emilio could never quite escape the uncertainty lurking somewhere deep in the back of his mind. He’d tried, of course. He’d done everything he was supposed to do to fashion himself into a weapon instead of a person, but hesitation clung to his bones like fallen rain clinging to the world after a brutal thunderstorm. He could never quite shake himself dry, never quite get rid of the feeling of questioning things.
And he was supposed to. He was supposed to get rid of it, was supposed to shake off those questions and that uncertainty, was supposed to be perfectly capable of thinking of nothing except what he had to do. It always seemed easy for Rosa, who was made of steel, or for Edgar, who only ever asked the questions he was supposed to ask. (Emilio did not know if it was easy for Victor, who was more of a martyr than a brother.) He was supposed to be better, was supposed to be smarter, was supposed to be easier to manage. He was none of the things he was supposed to be. He never really had been.
Whatever was wrong with him then was still wrong with him now, of course. He had not grown out of it, had not shed his doubts in childhood the way a person was meant to. He was broken, he thought; a mess of blood and shrapnel clumsily fashioned into the vague shape of a person, but never quite living up to the term. How could someone love a thing like that? You could appreciate a well-made weapon, could respect the balanced weight of it in your hand. You could love a brother, a son, a husband, a friend, could rely on the words they spoke to you. But how could anyone love a thing that existed somewhere between the two? A bastardized weapon, a sorry excuse for a man. Rosa and Edgar loved him out of obligation; Juliana loved him as a last resort. His uncle loved a child that didn’t exist anymore. His mother —
He choked on the thought. It was better, he thought, not to consider the way his mother might have loved him. Doing so would only lead to the inevitable question of whether or not she’d loved him at all.
Loving Emilio was a boulder that needed to be pushed up the side of a mountain. It was a canyon someone was expected to dig with a plastic spade. It was a sprawling castle built of playing cards in the midst of a hurricane. It was nothing he’d ever expected anyone to do willingly.
But here was Talia, sitting on his couch, teary eyed and aching, telling him it was easy. Here was Talia, mourning the loss of something she hadn’t even figured out how to put into words yet, telling him that he was not a mountain no one knew how to climb, or a poorly built structure waiting to fall under the weight of the first insect that landed on it. Talia, who was bright and stubborn and funny, told him that loving him was easy. And she’d never lied to him before, so he guessed she probably believed that. Maybe it was selfish of him not to correct her. Maybe she’d regret it in a few months, when she inevitably learned just how wrong she was. But for now, she fit tucked under his chin, and the warmth of her legs draped over him was better than any blanket at blocking out the chill of the winter air.
Emilio took a breath, trembling and careful and so utterly unnecessary that he ached with it. He leaned forward, pressing a kiss into her hair. “You’re not hard to… You’re not, either,” he murmured, wishing the word love wasn’t a thing that got caught in the back of his throat, even now. He loved Talia, because of course he did. He knew that. Knowing it was not the problem. It was the saying it that was hard, these days.
(There was a graveyard in his chest so full of the people he loved that sometimes, saying the word felt like picking up a shovel. He was so goddamn tired of digging.)
He let out a small, breathless laugh as she decided the heavy conversation was finished, relief crawling up his throat like bile. “You can barely even taste them unless you know they’re there,” he told her, feigning a seriousness on the topic that he didn’t feel. He handed her his phone, letting his hand linger by hers a moment longer than necessary. I love you, too. He couldn’t say it, but he tried to communicate it with the touch. He liked to think she knew.
In any case, even if he could do nothing else, he could be here for her. He could eat shitty pizza, he could drink shitty whiskey, he could talk about whatever she needed to talk about. Loving Talia was easy; Emilio did it without trying.
(Finding a pizza place in Wicked’s Rest that would deliver to Worm Row and not sneak worms into the toppings turned out to be a little harder, but… they figured it out, anyway. They were resourceful, after all.)