Three Days
The first day is blood.
Sands can feel it crawling down his cheeks, tacky as it bakes in the sun, drawing the goddamned flies around hsi face like a macabre halo. Sticky because the inner bit and pieces of his eyes have been pureed through the mess like scrambled eggs, but Sands doesn't want to think about that. That way lies madness, and he already dances close enough, thankyouverymuch.
Sands thinks of it anyway, leans over with his fingers splayed against the wall to keep himself from falling, and vomits. His only consolation is that it doesn't sound as if any of it lands on his shoes.
The blood/eyes/eggs mess on his face has made the bleeding halt faster than it would otherwise, keeping him conscious. Sands's stomach roils again like a canoe trapped on the middle of a choppy lake. He would very much like the luxury of vomiting again, but all that rises in his throat is bile. He slumps to the ground instead.
A pool of blood oozes beneath him, some of it still warm. The greatest portion of it is his, and he can only imagine the ruby-black color as it coagulates against brick colored dirt. Entire fucking country seems to be saturated today. The acrid taste of things best if never shown to the light of day bubbles upwards in Sands's throat again. He leans over just in time. Look at that. Plenty left to lose, after all.
The thought strikes Sands as obscenely funny, and a high, keening laugh rises in his throat. He suppresses it with force. First he would laugh, and then he would sob, and then he would scream.
And then he would die.
Ever since this miserable south-of-the-border coup went even further south, into the realm of the deeply, irretrievably fucked, Sands has avoided thinking about dying. He gives out death, he sure as hell doesn't drink it, and that is not going to change any time soon. Sands's finger curls around the trigger of his gun, caressing it the way he would a woman's breast. Not ever.
It is so much easier to convince himself of his own immortality when the taste of blood is not burning on his tongue.
The puddle beneath him is beginning to go chill. Sands isn't sure if this is a good thing or not. Can he be glad that he's stopped bleeding, if all it means in the end is that there is no more to bleed? Sands clenches his teeth against the taste of bile. He would like nothing more than to close his eyes, tilt his head back against the warm adobe wall, and rest, but hey-ho with a hearty side of fuck you, that problem has been taken care of rather permanently, hasn't it?
Chiclet's voice approaches, and Sands straightens as well as he is able. The boy's voice is high-pitched, his Spanish tumbling over itself too quickly for Sands to pick individual words out the bird-like cacaphony. Youthful panic is communicated well by tone alone.
My, my. He must look like a refugee from hell. It crosses Sands's mind to ask the one...two sets of footsteps travelling with the boy if they could spare him a mirror. The sharp, certain fear that they would turn and walk away, leave him to bleed to death in this dipshit backwater, is what keeps him silent.
Two sets of hands haul him to his feet, one on each side. Sands isn't ready for the movement and he stumbles, head rocking forward, glasses sliding from his face. A sluggish, half-conscious attempt to catch them fails, and sunlight is suddenly striking nerves that are never, never meant to greet the outside. Shocking whiteness almost convinces him that he can see, before agony catches up, angry at being left behind and eager to make up for lost ground.
Hypovolemic shock has stolen Sands's voice along with his muscles. His scream comes out as no more than a wheeze.
"Dios mio," one man whispers, and the other answers in rapid Spanish. The voice is like a guitar, smooth and flowing and sending adrenaline thrumming through Sands's veins in spite of the fact that he hears it from down a long, dark well.
He imagines that he would be much prouder of the instinctive survival response if he were able to stand on his own. Phantom swirls of purple and yellow are dancing on the edges of what used to be his vision, flitting away when he turns his head, half-convinced that a miracle has taken place. A low moan escapes his lips with their passing; the hands tighten. There's a train-like sound in his ears and his entire body feels cold.
"There he goes," the first man says in Spanish, finally slow enough for Sands to understand.
'Too much blood,' Sands thinks stupidly, as he feels streams of it running down his thighs, over his knees and down his shins. 'Story of this fucking country.'
Unconsciousness among the blind is not darkness, but an eternal sensation of falling.
The second day is fire.
Blistering, scorching, so bright and brilliant that if it weren't for the bandages covering the ruined caverns sunk into his face Sands imagines looking into them would reflect the very depths of hell.
The pain is, Sands thinks in the rare moments when he is lucid enough, blinding.
My, aren't the irony gods kicking his ass today.
He moans and twitches as the fire continues to consume his head and the holes bored into his limbs. Cool hands stroke his forehead occasionally, smoothing back hair soaked with sweat and still acrid with dust from the last stand that he somehow survived. Sands strikes out at them when he is strong enough; like a snake, he cannot help himself. It is just what he is programmed to do.
A hiss of air to remind him that he is not the only snake in the room, and the hand laves his forehead with a speed that Sands would be hard pressed to match even without a piece of lead in his arm. His wrist is caught in a grip of ice. "I think you have done enough damage, my friend." Low voice, strong accent.
Fuck.
Sands jerks his wrist back so quickly that the skin is chafed, small fragments left behind in the mariachi's grip.
He's just leaving bits of himself behind all over the place.
"What the hell are you doing here?" Oh, no, that doesn't sound weak or petulant at all. What he wouldn't do to have a gun in his hand right now.
El Mariachi chuckles, soft and low. It's a good laugh, but it does little to makes Sands less aware of the fact that he's injured and trapped in a room with a killer even more experienced than he. The hair on the back of his neck rises and the fire leaps behind the bandages over his face. He wonders how it is possible that El does not feel it.
"Keeping a balance," he says, stealing Sands's words from him with a casual arrogance that sets Sands's teeth on edge. He now understands the effect that he has on other people.
The bed shifts. El has seated himself on the edge of it. Though Sands would like very badly to move back, he refuses. Let the crazy fucker come as close as he wants; this whole fear game is getting old faster than fast. "There are people looking for you," El says. "Men who would like very much to see your head on a stick for the damage that you have caused."
There are far worse things that can be done to a man beyond ripping his eyes out, and Sands considers them all in the few seconds before he replies. His heart remains beating at exactly the same pace. "Am I going for a good price, then?" The swirls of yellow and purple are encroaching in on him again; this time he refuses to turn his head.
"Excellent," El Mariachi says, "if I were going to collect." His voice is travelling from a long distance. Sands sinks back against the pillows as a trickle of sweat runs beneath the bandages over his face, stinging so badly that he had to bite his lips to the point of blood to avoid sound. He has known worse pain than this. It's a bizarre sort of comfort.
As Sands is drawn back down into a feverish, sweating unconsciousness, El says something that he cannot quite catch. Sands thinks that one of the words is 'justice'.
His last act before passing out is to lift his middle finger in El Mariachi's direction.
The third day is death.
Death was Sands's friend long after Innocence had found other, less volatile playmates. Now it would seem that Death had turned on him as well.
Sands shivers and sweats and wishes for his guns. What he plans on shooting, he doesn't know. The answer is irrelevant. It dances on the edge of Sands's mind, sly and relentless, to think that he, too, has been rendered irrelevant. An unpleasant thought in a mind that already claims home to more than it's fair share; Sands pushes it away.
Three voices speak in Spanish above him; almost against his will, Sands finds himself listening. The bullet wound in his thigh, it would seem, has become infected. He may lose another body part.
Sands's lips split and he emits and unhealthy laugh. That's it, he believes in God. There's no way this much shit can happen to one person without a vengeful Force pressing His finger down on Sands's spine.
The doctor's vocie hesitates for only a second before it rolls on, tremulous, reedy. The good doctor decided within the first day of treating Sands that his patient is quite insane. Neither Chiclet nor El Mariachi has bothered to correct him. Sands thinks that this is even funnier. Chiclet giggles along with him, the high, nervous laugh of someone who, loyalty or not, would rather be elsewhere. Sands finds himself wondering idly if Chiclet has been there for as long as Sands has, if he even has anywhere else to go.
Concern for another human being is not something that Sands is accustomed to, not is it something that he particularly enjoys. It takes his attention away from the blackness where his eyes used to be, rendered into a gentle numbness by more drugs than he cares to contemplate. Away from thoughts of cataloguing his hurts and thinking of rather inventive ways to torture and kill those who gave them to him, he is nothing. That is one thing that he is ill-equipped to tolerate.
El speaks softly to both the doctor and Chiclet, his voice a sonorous rumble. Sands finds himself using it as a centering point in spite of himself, and it disgusts him. Maybe he'll add El to his list.
Who the hell is he kidding? He knows he will.
Chiclet and the doctor leave, the former reluctantly and with a final apologetic tap to Sands's arm (he's glad that the kid doesn't try to hug him or hold his hand or something, because then he would go deeply, irredeemably bugshit, and it's a line that he's been walking for far too long to appreciate slipping from now), the latter so fast that he nearly hits himself in the face with the door. Sands can hear the curses and the kid's muffled giggles.
Sands is left alone with the specter of Death himself.
El moves across the room to sit in what sounds like an armchair entering the golden years of its life. His sigh is that of a man who has stared his own mortality in the face far too many times, rather than a gunslinger skilled in the art of dealing it out. Almost, Sands is startled to realize, like an old man.
He would feel sorry for him, except, no.
El seems content to sit in the chair without speaking, like a freaking Mexican gargoyle. Sands, on the other hand, requires a little more stimulation.
"You know," he says, wheezing around a hoarse throat that suggests a lot of screaming in the not-too-distant past, "as the one missing body parts here, I think I have the greater right to sulk."
Creaking of springs and jangling of chain as the mariachi shifts his weight. Sands would like to think that he's unsettled him, but knows better. "You've earned your injuries."
Hello, anger. It had been so long that Sands had begun to wonder if it had fled him entirely. He embraces it like he would a lover-one that he would not ultimately be shooting in the gut-and uses it to chase away the sick, hungry despair that has begun to nip at him. "Not in this fucking lifetime, pal," Sands snaps, struggling to sit up against a drenching of sweat and limbs that seem to have traded their former strength in for the psuedo-dairy junk that fills the inside of twinkies. He makes it about halfway before his willpower collapses on him. Anger, on the other hand, is still going strong, moving away from the pack with every double-time beating of Sands's heart. He doesn't think that anything could ever feel this good again. It chases the grinning specter of death away from the room.
The man who deals it out like cards or kisses is still there, silent and impassive. Sands can't even hear the jangling of chains as the mariachi makes minute shifts in weight any longer, and the surge of panic that this disorienation sends rising into his throat is stronger than he will ever admit.
"Not in this lifetime," Sands repeats, leveling his finger in the general direction where he believes El Mariachi to be. The other man chuckles and Sands makes a minor shift to the left. God, how he wishes there was a gun in his hand. "The bullets, yeah, okay. You shoot people, you and yours get shot, as I'm sure that you have already figured out for yourself." There's an angry shifting of weight, and Sands bares his teeth before he continues. One, two, three...if the blow was coming, it would have been delivered by now. While Sands doesn't doubt that El would strike a blinded man, that is not what this is about. What it is about, however, remains very much in question, a fact that gnaws on him like the rats would have if he had been left in the street for very much longer.
God bless Mexico.
"That's karma," Sands continues. "This?" He raises his hand and makes a stabbing motion towards the sullenly oozing craters that he can feel beneath yards of bandages. A twinge of pain from his arm reminds him that soulful brown peepers aren't the only casualty of this tequila-soaked wasteland. Wincing, Sands drops his hand back into his lap. "Nothing justifies this." The words come out more broken than he intended. He hopes that El Mariachi is not a good enough reader of people to notice.
"I agree." Shit out of luck. The pity, carefully modulated but by no means hidden, that floats from across the room is almost worse than the pain in his head. Sands's hand twists angrily, helplessly against the sheets. "Wounds like that need to be avenged."
The lights in Sands's head click on all at once, if he'll allow himself the luxury of an expression that doesn't really fit any longer, and he doubles over in a painful, wheezing laughing fit that takes almost as much from him as it gives. But, oh, how it feels good. More annoyed shiftings from the chair. Sands laughs harder. "That's why you're doing this?" he gasps. "To get some kind of partner in your games of vengeance? And what kind of help do you think you're going to get from a blind fucking gunfighter?" The moment the words are out of his mouth, they stop being funny. Sands closes his lips around a surge of bile.
"You did well enough three days ago." El's voice is soft, measured, and suddenly so close that it makes Sands shiver. How is he supposed to get on in the world without his eyes, when he can't even tell if there's someone standing right next to him? He should have been left in the street, Sands thinks, and the immediacy and clarity with which the thought comes to him makes his mouth go dry.
"There are three holes in me that shouldn't be there," Sands replies tightly, fighting the urges to keen and to punch El as hard as he can in the mouth. Maybe later. "If that's your idea of a good job, then I'm glad that I can't see what your body looks like by candlelight. Pick the option behind door number two."
The cliche likely goes right over El Mariachi's head, but he figures out the gist soon enough. "Maybe, then, I wanted to understand a man who could shoot a cook and save a child, and claim to care nothing about either." Fingers touch lightly beneath Sands's chin, coaxing his face upward so that, if he were't living in a world that had gone systematically mad, Sands would be staring El in the face. He pulls away, but it is not the angry, defiant gesture that he was anticipating from himself.
Redemption. He thinks he likes revenge better. "How you have survived this long eludes me," Sands says slowly. For once, he is not fighting a mad grin or an angry scowl.
He can imagine El Mariachi smiling in the short silence that follows his words. It is not an unpleasant image. "Fortune enjoys making a joke of me." El's fingers whisper across the bandages that hide Sands's stigmata from the world and, goddamnit, he can feel the mariachi smirking. "As it would seem that she does with you, as well."
Sands twists thsoe words in his head, scours them from the ill intent that he knows must be there. He feels oddly cheated when his search turns up nothing other than curiosity and a faltering, ill-worn sense of compassion. There's more to this. There has to be. "You dragged me off the street," Sands tests the words, allowing the full weight of his disbelief to drip like acid, "because you were curious?"
"I thought it was something that you would be familiar with." Just for a second, the bite that Sands was waiting for, the resentment, shines through. He braces, but El does nothing more ominous than move away from the bed, sending the chains on his pants jingling merrily. Sands is grateful for the sound, as it allows him to track the movements of this dangerous, apparently crazed man as though he could do something if he chose to attack, at the same time that he wants to scream obscenities at the world for making him need it. The fever is rising in his head along with the pounding in his limbs, making him wish that El would just go away alread and let him sleep. He'll decide later if he wants to wake up.
El returns to the bedside, seizing Sands's wrist and placing three small objects into his palm before he can pull away. Sands closes his hand around them reflexively: pills.
"One is for the pain," El says slowly, sounding as if he is choosing his words with even greater care than usual, "and the other two are for the infection." The curiosity is still there, greatly muted. Sands tries and fails to imagine a life where so little is surprising any longer that measuring the reactions of an admitted sociopath could be considered novel and exciting. Living in a world plunged into darkness, with only the occasional cruel, phantom flash of color, he figures he will soon get the chance.
"Is this test supposed to be multiple choice or essay?" He sounds bitter. He sounds old.
"Life or death," El responds, as if he is blissfully unaware of the cliche. He rises and walks out, leaving the click of the door closing to answer any comebacks that Sands may have come up with.
A newly blind, despondent man alone in a room with a handful of pills. Never a good idea. Sands jiggles the pills within his fist, listening to the soft sounds of them striking off each other. Life and death, measured out into his palm.
'A man who would shoot a cook and save a child, and claim to care nothing about either.' Sands doesn't understand that man any more than El does. The specter of him, newly minted and still sharp to the touch, is more frightening than he cares to admit. To a man who has always dealt in certainties, yes/no, the powerful and the powerless, it is a chasm more terrifying than the one before his face. Curiosity, then.
"What the hell," Sands mutters. He lifts the pills to his mouth and dry-swallows them with a grimace. Sweat from his palm has dissolved them slightly; they leave a bitter trail all the way down to his stomach, reminder that a choice had just been made.
Sands lays back and pretends that he is staring at the ceiling, until eventually he falls asleep.
On the fourth day, Sands awakes to the sound of the guitar. There is a soft rasping of wood against cloth as the guitar is set aside, and El Mariachi says, "Good morning."
'Not good,' Sands thinks, hugging the bitterness like a rotten tooth that he can't bring himself to stop tonguing. 'But maybe it's morning.'