#70sau

should be tagged for suicidal thoughts, can’t cos I got blocked from the tag for it. (I need a citrus scale for trigger warnings, is wot)

Anyway. Fic. 

It’s not the winter that breaks his heart, harsh as it is; there’s a strong-willed petulance in him that resents its cruelty too much to let it break him. 

He counts up his faults with dutiful enthusiasm, still. Used to long after them, recite the list ferociously at confession, each one a bright thunderbolt to light storm-tossed skies. Anger, every time he hears his confirmation name (the brothers never say it right, not ever). Lust, at the sight of that stupid, fluff-haired acolyte who can’t stop stumbling over the responses at mass; gluttony, the hunger he warded off every fast day with hidden rations of honey and crackers. 

But all his sins are faded now, into these endless unstinting days, and his throat closes with a misery made paradoxically livable by its sheer potency, the hot slow planning of his martyrdom. It lasts him out until spring, a spring that blows over his flat, waterless hell with no more kindness than the snows, when the last small misery comes to claim him at last. 

(one gorgeous mother-of-pearl rosary his mother gave him, gone missing forever. no money to join a field trip at the port, to see boats that travelled from the wide encompassing sea. his fluff-haired fellow made an altar boy, for no reason he can understand with any degree of charity. it doesn’t matter which it was. any of them, all of them, this is when he learns that indifference for the past.)

And so. Today is the strangest Saturday in all the year, the one day when God moves in neither earth nor heaven; the perfect day for suicides, then.

(this was the light of his hope- two chocolate bars and a stolen orange- and as they’re caught and confiscated, so the storm gives way at last to dreamless blank; this, he thinks, is what they call despair.)

(he feels like he might have staved off the mortal sin, if they’d only let him have the orange and take the whipping for it afterwards. A whipping he could have coped with so much more easily, no worse than the knock-down fights back home.)

(he doesn’t miss home, now. too many letters, telling of their bottomless pride, and it stopped being a place he even wanted. New York without his parents would be a godless heaven, and where else is there to be?)

It takes no little difficulty. To congeal the wet, shapeless grossness of his presence into a worthy candle, fit to burn, is exhausting labour, only hard-won- but he knows something now about self-denial and the martyr’s reward. 

The martyr’s reward being this: jam. 

Lots of jam. 

There’s a locked room in the cloisters where nobody’s allowed to go. The room where all the sugared blackberry and strawberry and cherry-apple-blackcurrant and everything else is kept in storage for the secular truck drivers, who’ll come take it away without a word. To his sharp, intense disappointment (how can he still muster the energy, to be upset by anything further? and files it away as one more complaint to hold his despair fast)- there are no huge jelly vats in the forbidden place, no wine press filled to the brim, no treacly pool of delight to provide the elegant, dark and endlessly sweet drowning of which he’s dreamt. Only rows of jar after tiny jar, joy strictly measured out by the ounce, delights too rationed to kill quickly. 

(only slowly)

But hope springs eternal. Up in a creaky loft, there’s a huge barrel of oranges put by for making marmalade, with a top he only manages to pry off after a solid quarter-hour’s effort; he figures that’ll do. Balancing his weight on the cold weight of a metal stool, peering into the salty, citrusy interior, he catches a scent that might almost be the sea; and lets himself wonder for a moment, if that’s all it will take to hold him safe. 

(it doesn’t)

He plunges his hand in and takes a nibble from one iridescent segment. Drops it again, shuddering all over at its unspeakable taste- such a beautiful fruit, to be more bitter than lemon. Curdling in his mouth. Enough. Enough of this. 

The door opens, gentle and noiseless. Someone enters, to call him by name. 

“Hey,” he says. “Tuco- it is Tuco, isn’t it? Saw that on your letters.”

Tuco glances down the loft ladder, judges trajectories and distance. He could, he figures, pull the stool in after him. Weigh himself down enough to drown in this barrel, before anybody could get him out again. 

“The hell’s wrong with you? You’re teacher’s pet, you’re everything they want you to be. And studying on a scholarship, too- why risk all that to come looking for me here?”

“Because I thought I could do something about it.”

Tuco finds himself shuddering again, and not for his own woes. There’s boastfulness in those words and tone, a self-regard that has nothing to do with God or man or kindness to him, but simple command. Thou shalt not, let that suffice you. 

Who do you think you are, eh?

“I brought you a bacon sandwich. You’ll have to come down to get it.” Pulls out the rich fatty delicacy from a paper bag, tosses it teasingly in the air, and Tuco wavers for a moment, very giddy. Then drops back into Spanish for the first time in months, to swear at him with the right mouth-filling oath.

(the thing he hadn’t appreciated about this state of mind; the smallest mercies become miracles, and he's not spiritual enough to hold to a fast in the face of that temptation)

But it's like waking from a dream- why in god's name would he do harm to himself, with his body clinging on to life with such patient insistence, sure in its wants and appetites, so reassuring in its joys? Other sins he craves, he'll take in their plenty; not this one, never this one.

(They leave that night, unseen, and part ways at the next truck stop; he doesn’t see Blondie again for a long time to come.)

They don’t sleep together, as it happens. 

It would have been anti-climatic, rather literally, and Tuco’s very grateful for the double bathrooms adjacent to Angel Eyes’ bedroom. If a little less so for the lack of privacy- all right, so a rich voyeur might have every reason to install these gilded swinging doors, like the saloon in an old western, but they look flimsy and he feels rather exposed. 

(Especially since Angel has a toilet with an actual door, the bastard. He should have nabbed that one instead, but shamelessness is one thing. Standing numb and stupid in another man’s bedroom, with his member half falling out of his jeans and ecstasy still burning up his veins, had been another thing altogether and he’d been only too glad to stumble into the one without a lock on it.)

Contrast. The sheer, solid wealth of this place awes him all over again, now he’s alone and had time to catch a few breaths. Black and green stone everywhere, marble maybe, hell he doesn’t know- the only time he’s seen anything like it has been the odd overpriced hotels, at the height of their luck. And him in sweat-marked Hawaiian shirt and soiled pants. He grabs a wad of toilet paper, dampens it a little to help scrape off the cum. 

There’s a sound of running water on the other side of the wall; presumably, Angel Eyes is doing much the same thing. Or not. Maybe rich people just throw out their underwear every night, like he heard once about the queen of England. 

“The shit isn’t going to stink any less, because of these pretty surroundings,” he says aloud, just to see if he’ll get a response. There isn’t one. 

Shrugging, he cleans up his clothes as best he can, and takes advantage of the showerhead to wake himself up a bit. Three minute drill had always been a necessity during winters back home, before the hot water turned icy; he prefers baths these days but isn’t going to stand around hoping for one. Blondie always goes to work on the assumption that he holds all the cards. He likes playing at that himself, but it doesn’t stop him noticing where the exit signs are. 

(Besides, kicking out the third party strikes him as a sensible way of resolving this little Mexican stand-off they have going. It’s what he’d do.)

At this point, he might not even mind leaving; that big meal, a good wank, all he needs to do is find somewhere decently sheltered and he’ll sleep for hours. He and Blondie have an agreed rendezvous at the town border, as usual. Six o’clock tomorrow evening. 

If nobody’s there, well...by then he’ll be hungry enough to need a new plan. That’ll keep him busy enough not to fret. 

A slight bitterness chills him, while he dries off and rummages through the Duluth for his straight razor; this Angel Eyes is like who he ought to be, if he’d been lucky and wealthy and smart. Or maybe just smart. Enough to think up a really sharp dodge, not just their easy brainless games, something that would justify all this worry and hustle. 

(He’s been content to let Blondie do the thinking, because his partner was always so good at it. Is still good at it; this must be why they’re here at all, why Blondie had gone to such lengths convincing him to look up Carson. There couldn’t have been a better way to work back into his Angel’s affections, than to win that game, look sharp and independent doing it...and then, the damned tease, hold off on closing the deal. Give it a week and Blondie will probably have lawyers inventing the man-to-man prenup.)

There’s six different kinds of shaving oil on the long fluted shelf below the sink, along with creams and perfumes and who knows what else; Tuco ignores all of them and starts shaving dry. His face is still damp, that’s good enough for him- it has to be, more often than not- 

god above, he’s tired. Or not half drunk enough. He retrieves a miniature from a roll of clean socks and polishes it off without looking at the label, feels a little better. Getting out of this house would be a start, if he can remember the way out. Maybe lift something missable, while he’s about it. 

A door opens, and Angel Eyes walks out, peers at him over the swinging doors. Clad in something it takes Tuco a moment to recognise as a bathrobe. The material’s thicker than regular terrycloth and cut a little oddly, straight down and lacking a belt loop. Something about seamless garments...but the thought slips his mind almost immediately. 

“You might as well sleep here for the night,” Angel Eyes says. “There’s six other bedrooms you can have your pick of tomorrow, but I’m not giving you the guided tour at this hour of night. Take your time in the morning, I want to have a long conversation with Blondie before I talk to you again.” 

From that angle, Tuco reckons, approximately one hundred percent of him is on display; might as well not even have a door. He carries on shaving. “You want to explain, why you’re not driving me off with a shotgun?”

“Blondie seems to want you to stay- or at least, didn’t demand that you go. For now that’s enough. There are other things you might do, to stay longer.” 

Depends on the price. Sometimes he pays it, sometimes he doesn’t, but he always hears it out, however humiliating the process of listening turns out to be. He bites back a good sharp comeback, readies himself for one more round. 

“Such as what?”

“You can second-guess him.”

“Sometimes. Sometimes, yeah- he’s my partner. What about it?”

“Teach me how to do it,” Angel Eyes says. 

Impossible. You’d have to be Blondie, to match him. 

“Sure thing. Any other little miracles you want done?”

“That’ll do for now...”

“No hay de qué,” Tuco says, easily; nicks himself across the ear, and spends the next several minutes swearing the air good and blue.