Martín's hand was shaking around the knife's handle, his knuckles white and shiny. He was probably aiming for intimidating or ruthless, but to Andrés he looked small and pitiful instead. A spooked animal, backed into a corner.
Andrés held up his hands placatingly. See, Martín, it was supposed to say, I’m not going to hurt you. Again.
“Why don’t we talk like civilized men, hmm? Put down the knife.”
A shallow sound tore itself from Martín's throat, more bark than laugh.
“You don’t get to tell me what to do,” Martín bit out. The anymore lingered in the air between them, as dark and foreboding as the blade of a guillotine. “You left me, Andrés. You fucking left me."
But Andrés knew what Martín was really saying. Of what he was accusing him.
You left me to wither away, to rot, to die.
You left me to become this.
Andrés swallowed.
“I had to,” he said, heart in his mouth. "There was no hope for us. If I had taken you with me, it would have killed us both."
Martín snarled.
“So what, huh? We always knew that we’d die sooner or later. Just like we knew that we’d die together.”
He sucked in a ragged breath. The tears were streaming down his face now. Andrés knew Martín was too proud to wipe them away. To admit that he cared, that Andrés could hurt him, still.
“That was the only thing I cared about,” Martín went on. “I just wanted to be with you.”
He sounded so lost, so helpless. Like he couldn’t understand what had happened between them.
Slowly, carefully, Andrés took another step toward Martín.
The effect was immediate. Martín tensed as if he'd been electrocuted, alert. His hand snapped up again, the knife’s edge glinting in the dim light of his apartment.
“Don’t!” He bit out. “One more step and I’ll fucking gut you.”
Andrés ignored him.
Not giving Martín a chance to react, he closed the distance between them in fast strides, wrapping his arms around Martín and pulling him against his chest.
The knife sliced through the sleeve of his jacket, its blade dragging across Andrés's skin.
He barely felt it.
The only thing he could focus on was Martín. How he struggled against him, how he whimpered and mewled like an animal about to claw off its own leg to escape from the hunter's trap.
Andrés tightened his grip.
“I couldn’t give you what you wanted. Not back then,” he said, thinking about his mother's disease. His own, now.
“But things have changed,” he continued, thinking about the medicaments Sergio had procured for him, about the trembling in his hands becoming less and less with each passing day. “I will have you now."
Martín froze against him.
For a moment there was only silence and the pounding of Andrés's heart.
This was it.
The moment of truth.
The knife clattered to the floor.
Martín’s arms wound around Andrés’s middle as he pressed against him, impossibly close. As if he was trying to climb inside Andrés, to mend their broken souls, to bring them back together.
“Hijo de puta. Next time, I’ll kill you right away.”
Andrés just smiled, and pressed a kiss against the top of Martín's head. Good thing he wasn’t planning on leaving Martín ever again.
It's me, the person with the most picky taste in AUs (we haven't been introduced like that before, I believe, so hello!), and I just spun the mental wheel of AUs from the list and it's landed on the "Wrong number AU" 😋
At the exact moment when his phone rang, Andrés was contemplating pouring some boiling water on his right foot, just so he might have something to do. He was bored out of his mind.
After his newest robbery, which had admittedly not gone entirely according to plan, through no fault of Andrés’s, Sergio had been so worried about him being caught by the police that he had shipped him off to Columbia and equipped him with an Argentinian burner phone without any credit to make calls.
Andrés had now spent two entire weeks at the safe house, with only a sometimes-functioning radio and that useless phone to keep him company. It was not the high life he had imagined for himself.
Regardless of all this, when the phone rang, he picked it up very cautiously. Sergio was the only one who had the number, but it didn’t seem likely that he would call, he was always so careful and calculated – unless something had gone wrong, on his end.
“Hello?” he answered, idly wondering how the good people of Argentina usually answered their phones.
“Hi, I’d like to order a pizza,” announced a man’s voice politely at the other end of the line.
Andrés took the burner phone away from his ear and stared at it for a moment. Had Sergio finally decided to arrange some entertainment for him, after all?
“Hello?” the stranger tried.
“You’ve got the wrong number.” Either that, or this was some kind of a ploy by the police – albeit a very strange one. And Sergio would have never been careless enough to leave this burner phone traceable.
“Do I? Well, fuck.” He had a nice little Argentinian accent, full of soft lilts, dropping out letters and grossly mispronouncing others.
“Have you memorised the number for a local pizza place or something?” Andrés asked, amused by this turn of events.
“Something like that. Apparently I did a terrible job at it.”
“Truly. Just save it for next time.”
Considering how Andrés was still entertaining this phone call, he was starved for human contact, surely. That, and bored. Sergio shouldn’t have just left him here. It was rude.
“Great advice, thank you so much.” Andrés liked to imagine he might hear an eye roll.
“Did you see the news about the jewellery heist?” he asked, liked basking for a moment in the idea that the news would have travelled this far, that quickly.
“The one in Croatia? I did, actually. Why are you asking?”
“Just curious.”
There was a brief silence at the other end of the line, but it seemed thoughtful rather than dismissive. “I’ll admit, it was a well-made plan. Just on the right side of reckless. I like that in a job.”
Andrés craned his neck at the praise. “Have you stolen things, yourself?” The way the man talked about it made the answer seem obvious – who even called them jobs? – but Andrés wanted to hear more about it. There was something enticing about the prospect, speaking with another criminal without needing to bother to actually encounter one. So many of them were brainless idiots.
“Nothing I would admit to on the phone,” the man said, but with an amused rhythm to the words. “I have never strayed on the wrong side of the law.”
“No, me neither.”
“Obviously not. Castellano, so probably too good to be stealing things, right?” Andrés may have momentarily forgotten that he too had an accent, but there was something pleasant about being seen, and known, in this manner.
“Absolutely.”
“Well, I’m not above it for any moral concerns. Just legal reasons. Prisons are fucking awful.”
“Of course. Say, what would you steal, if you were to change your mind?”
“Banco de España,” the man replied, without hesitation. Like he really had thought about it. Like it was obvious to him, that given the opportunity, he might rob only one of the best-guarded buildings in all of Spain.
“Well, you’re not overflowing with humility.” Andrés liked that, actually. He found too many people to be ridiculously bound by falsified modesty, unable to demand for what they truly wanted.
“Why not? I think there would be a poetic justice in it. You stole our gold; I would be taking it back.”
Poetic justice. Andrés liked that thought.
“And bathe in it, I suppose?”
“Would you not? Of course I would bathe in it. I would do everything—” he stretched out the word in a way that made Andrés understand implications he had never heard aimed at himself before, but he didn’t find it unpleasant. He was somewhat intrigued, actually. Probably just bored out of his mind, and thus willing to entertain any thoughts that crossed his mind. “—in that gold.”
Andrés found himself considering, for some reason, asking this stranger if he’d be interested. In stealing things. With Andrés. He felt like he could use a partner, someone who wasn’t as uptight and bound by ethics as Sergio. He could use a partner, as long as he was trustworthy. And where did you go about finding trustworthy criminals? Might as well entertain this one that had appeared out of nowhere. He might even consider Banco de España, if they crafted a functional plan, one that was just on the right side of reckless.
He liked the man’s accent, and his levity. He liked hearing the praise, even if it wasn’t intended as such. He liked his brashness. Those were all equally awful reasons to ask someone to steal jewellery with him.
And yet…
“Well, as pleasant as this has been, I’m hungry. I’m going to actually order that pizza now. Chau.”
The man at the other end ended the call, before Andrés had the chance to even respond. Not that he had a response in mind, anyway.
Andrés automatically checked for a caller ID, but it had been an unknown number.
Ah, well.
He had momentarily imagined a future for himself, with this stranger, but he was sure it wouldn’t have worked out regardless. The man was probably nothing more than a petty and talentless pickpocket, the kind South America was full of. Andrés was just bored. If he truly wanted a companion that badly, he could easily find one on the street. They were thirteen to a dozen.
Andrés was better off without him. He was better off without anyone, for that matter.
I'm pretty sure Andrés' birth year being set as 1975 (I don't remember if it is so, but let's suppose) is just another continuity error by the writers who didn't track these things; they put Andrés at 1.90 height like I'm supposed to believe Pedro is that tall; but also Andrés had the child with one of his wives, so the chances of that child being born when he's 14 are slim. I think they just were going off Pedro's actual age, and he could theoretically have a ~25 y.o. child, but then they forgot what they threw in the show earlier. I mean, they also had Andrés say "your father" to Sergio, and then in part 5 we learn him and Sergio have the same father. Nobody's tracking shit, they just go with the flow.
Who could forget the 190cm height chart? That honestly had me laughing for days. I love how they pay zero attention to the most basic facts about their own characters, like height and age asdfasdf.
Yeah, 1975 is laughable too because Pedro (as good as he looks) does not look like a man in his mid-30s at any point in the flashbacks LMAO. It makes way more sense to just assume Andres is however old Pedro is at any given time (him having the kid in his 20s seems plausible to me anyway).
The "your father" thing honestly threw me off so hard in Part 1/2. Only after I wrote an entire fic based on them having the same mother and different father did I see that interview where Alvaro went, "oh yeah, we headcanoned ourselves with the same father!" and then Alex Pina decided to roll with and confirm it in Part 5 LOL. Which doesn't bother me since I kind of assumed they'd confirm that hc at some point any way.
In all likelihood, it's like you said- they just don't track shit in their own show. The more cursed option is that they know exactly what they're doing, are playing all of us for fools, and Andres' cursed backstory is a gendbend version of The Tale of Genji.
Can I ask you to share your writing process a bit (I don't remember if you've answered a question like that before)? I think you once said that you write the whole thing first and then brush it up as you publish chapter by chapter; do you draw a storylines map (real or mental), write down things you surely want to include and then with that research you go in, or you go with the flow, so to speak?
For sure! I might have talked about it once or twice but it would’ve been a long time ago and anyway things change over time
I used to always physically write out an outline for every story, with bullet points, sub-sections, all that good stuff. These days I use a google doc for notes and outlines, and my outlines are more paragraphs/sections of pre-written dialogue stitched together in roughly chronological order for me to use as a sort of map to get from point a to b to c and so on. Important plot or character details get written down just so I won’t forget them if I end up not working on the story for a while (learned that one the hard way). I also jot down songs and words and turns of phrase that seem like they belong and might or might fit into the final product.
just for example, this is just a look at my notes doc for the new Joker/OC fic I haven’t really done much with yet (but have like 10 pages of notes for):
It functions as a sort of toolchest that I put together over time and pull from as I work, but it’s all pretty fluid. Some things don’t get used at all, some things get co-opted by other fics– it’s part of why I do write a full first draft before I start sharing anything publicly; primarily it’s because I’m pretty shitty at continuity unless I can look at the whole thing at once but it’s also because it gives me a longer time to look at what I’ve written and decide what doesn’t work, what’s clumsily done and needs to be cut or re-written. (spoiler alert for myself but if something doesn’t sit well with me the first time I re-read it then it’s not going to get any better and I’m better off cutting it and writing something different than waiting and hoping it will!)
I love having my notes, but when it comes to the actual writing process I’m very much a “discovery” writer, wherein I sit down knowing what I need to achieve plotwise, but the details, dialogue, and overall means of getting these people from one plot point to another are 95% a mystery to me, and they come to me as I’m putting the words down.
(I miss being in college and being able to stay up till dawn most nights because this style of writing works much better if you have eight hours in which to really immerse yourself in the zone, and now I have a full time job and a mortgage and 1 dog and 2 cats and it is much more difficult to find the time to just write 😣 woe!)
I write more days than I don’t, but because of life stuff it’s often just chunks of 500 words here and there and it takes a while to get a full draft going– but I hate the times when I just go without writing at all for like a month, so I make an effort to do at least a little bit most days, even if it’s something purely self-indulgent that’ll never see the light of day. My most productive days, though, are when I do have extra time and can shut myself up in my room with just a reading lamp on, a movie score playing (lately I favor the Annihilation soundtrack), and using this app to keep me from getting distracted while I work. Fingers crossed for more of those.
idk if this was the sort of answer you wanted, let me know if you have other questions about it all!
