Work Text:
The United States wasn’t too different from Colombia. The unsavory corners of its society held just as much promise of sleaze. Eduardo had been the Vice Minister of Justice in Colombia, though. He had had no business drinking down to the bottom of a glass with a beer company’s scuffed logo stuck to it in Colombia. The wines had been in crystalline vessels so translucent that each bubble of fizz could be counted. Every room had better lighting in Colombia.
But there’s no more Colombia because he cut himself loose. He tries not to think about why. Now he’s just in a seedy bar and the lighting’s dim. He won’t have to fight the impulse to think about ‘why’ after a couple more drinks. The taste had been acquired, but the haze was welcomed right away.
This is his habit now. He habitually commutes to this bar, taking the crowded bus from his night classes. Stop after stop, he tries not to think too much. He reads each plastered bus ad with an earnestness he’d possessed before, but he won’t allow himself to think about ‘before’ either. He buys the same drink multiple times each night. It’s his usual now. It’s a tacky, cheap drink, but at the bar it’s known as his.
Eduardo is tacky now. He’s succeeded in submerging to the level of this dive bar. Covering himself in the grease and the dirt, tarnishing any polish from any past lives. A rebirth in the saddest sense of the word. But he’s not going to think about ‘why’. Or who.
‘Who’. As a reflex he takes a frantic sip. Nothing reaches his lips. He’s reached the bottom. Snarling in frustration, he waves his hand flippantly to gesture towards the bartender for more. His usual. He gets a nod in response. It’s hot, suddenly. It gets hot in this bar. He should choose a new one. He makes a mental note to choose a new one. He knows he won’t. There’s no tie around his neck but his hands are itching to loosen one from around a starched collar. He feels feverish. Sick. There’s sweat on his temple and he remembers a gun in his peripheral but he’ll shut that memory down with his next drink. Where is his next drink?
Then there’s a tap on his shoulder. His too-broad shoulders seize and the shitty glass he was rubbing condensation off of teeters from the sticky counter to the stickier floor. He whips his head to his right and there’s a man—a man he gets the uncanny feeling that should be avoiding—and a woman. The man is in a cheap, black tuxedo. He’s toying with a cigarette perched between his lips. The woman is wearing an obscene amount of makeup. She’s taller than the man, and it isn’t just because of the pink, plastic pumps she’s wearing.
Eduardo’s eyes dart between the two of them. His mind is slower now, which he stubbornly wants to see as a blessing, but he’s fighting through the bleariness to assess this… this what? There’s a quiet voice in his head repeating the word ‘threat’ over and over like a muted alarm system, but he knows that voice is just a glitchy default from his past when things like threats mattered. He ignores it. He doesn’t speak first. He waits, sweat starting to drip down from his slick curls to his forehead.
“Hey, man,” the suited chainsmoker starts with a smooth cadence. “We noticed that you finished your drink. Wondered if you wanted another with us, over there.” He gestures to three stools on the other side of the dark bar.
“We won’t be here for too long,” the woman cut in with a sultry voice. “And it’s a five-minute walk back to our place.”
The wheels started turning in Eduardo’s head. No. Really, no. He’d made it to the bottom. He’s here at his bar. He has a usual. He doesn’t need to do anything else. He’s staying at his stool and watching the ring of condensation on his coaster grow when the drink he already ordered is ready. He’s getting to the bottom of the glass and then going back to his disheveled, trashy apartment and scanning haphazardly through a used textbook about international communications, alone.
It scares him that he’s succeeded. So much a part of the filth that he’s been asked to partake in something so unseemly, so brash, so reckless, so obscene. No. Then Eduardo looks down into the man’s steady brown eyes framed by coiffed black hair, and he nods. He’s taken by both elbows by smug smiles that have done this before a million times, and he sluggishly realizes that it had simply been a proposition.
He breathlessly, internally concludes—‘threat’.
——————————
The second that the splintered-wooden door is shut behind them, Eduardo’s lips are on the other man’s.
He doesn’t want to think about the reasons why he has the impulse to stop and worry about his public image. That doesn’t matter. That doesn’t matter anymore. And he can’t stop kissing this man now. He doesn’t want to pull back. Something has awoken inside of him. Something has clicked. Something that’s never clicked before.
‘Before’. Eduardo leans in closer—the direction leading away from his mind.
Is this what he’s always wanted? His hands rustle against the polyester tuxedo. They slide up, up, and up to that black hair. He moans. He didn’t think that he would. The other man goes along with it all. He’s done this before. Eduardo hasn’t, but, oh, does he want to.
He almost pulls his hands back from the other man’s hair to remove his tie. He should remove his tie. He remembers he doesn’t have one, almost too late. His hands were about to leave the nest they’d made in those ebony roots, but now they don’t have to stop rifling through hairsprayed locks while foreign hands unbutton his shirt. They both don’t stop.
Then he hears a voice, a woman’s voice—oh, God, the woman—go, “You must reeeeally miss him,” in an amused tone.
He almost jerks away as panic spikes in his throat, but the implications get shoved down by a tongue entering his mouth. He moans again and shuts his eyes tight. In the darkness behind his eyelids there’s a man in front of him. He’s shorter. He’s got brown eyes. His hair is black. He has a suit on, and under his starched collar there’s a tie. He has no name. No name but the one pushing forward in his own mind, crowding his consciousness now. A name he doesn’t want to think about, but now he knows he won’t be able to hold it back behind his gnashing teeth by the end of this.
He’s been caught. He yields. Through the heat, the sweat, the gasps, he looks into the eyes before him, under him, and he sees someone else. He didn’t know. He hadn’t known. Eduardo had never realized he wanted to exalt him this way, that he had been running all along into his embrace. With a final cry, he gives in.
“César.”