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“This was you?”
Antonio looks towards her, tuckered away in the darkest corner of the storage room, cobwebs and dust centuries old upon them, coating their fingertips like tar.
“I’m sure it doesn’t seem like it, depending on what time it was commissioned. Sometimes, they liked to gloss over my features, make me a little more palatable, if you know what I…”
Something itches at his throat. Whatever ramble he had been set upon dies on the tip of his tongue, watching as Xochitl lifts the shrouds that had been covering the painting for just about four hundred and thirty years to reveal his face in the corner.
“Ah.”
1588. They drift along the most unforgiving foreign coast, barely escaping, gaping holes littering the bulk of their ship but they have yet to be sunk.
“That was a very long time ago.” Anxiety creeps over his shoulders just looking at it and he tries to, tries to wipe it off, dust himself off, looking as if there were anything on him. Xochitl blows on it like in the movies but the grime it has gathered sticks to the varnish far too well, to the point where she cackles, “It’s just like you. Dusty, musty-”
Le cuesta abrir los ojos. Pain is all he can see. A bullet had passed through his cheek and out the other side, but his crew knew what they were dealing with, far too familiar with the comings and goings of his soul to take pause. Now he was awake, and the fight was over, the fight for…?
What was he fighting for, again?
Blood in his eyes again. Tears cloud his vision as well. Oh, to be alive. (He slips back under).
“I’m sorry you had to see this, actually.” His lips are pulled tight across a clenched jaw, nails digging into his cheek. “It was never meant to be pleasant, I suppose, but it was certainly one of my lower points.” Antonio walks over and shakes the portrait free completely.
He can feel himself dying, the two forces within him fighting for dominance. He wants to be numb, numb, numb, welcoming the freezing cold of death as it settles into his bones first. Life is like fire, cauterizing slashes and singing the bullet wounds that riddle his body. The fever of healing burns its way from inside out. His blood boils and begins to pour out of his nose, his ear.
Whoever it was that was carrying him drops him rather harshly on the table and he can feel his leg again as it rolls o… as it rolls… oh dear, he thinks, that shouldn’t be rolling that way, and he has to look, even as he’s tarring his shirt with the black bile being burnt out of his body through the sides of his mouth, his nostrils;
“I took this to the Court, you know,” he sighs, using his thumb to try and smudge away at some of the more affected areas. “I don’t think they liked it much.”
Without much thought they’ve already attached the tourniquet. When it comes to him, not much has to be considered. They could, but he isn’t as fragile. He recovers faster. He’s also the source of their troubles. When they love him, they love him with everything they have. When they are tired and hurt and afraid and angry, they do what they are doing now. A rag is shoved haphazardly into his mouth but he screams it out.
Wait, he screams, wait! The saw had been brought out. He grabs the nearest man, syllables dropping one by one: El—ar—tis—ta. His body begins to quake and he’s laid down again. But they haven’t cut through him yet, not yet. The artist has been summoned.
“You look young.”
“I was sixteen, cariño.” Antonio makes himself smile now despite the churning in his stomach. “It’s making me realize I haven’t aged well at all. Comparado con este tío, parezco calabaza.”
Another death portrait. A death in progress, actually. God knows what coating his throat, Antonio hacks out several commands. Keep painting. Keep painting. They’re sawing through him. Paint. Show them what really happens out here. The sea is in his ear, waves crashing. Beginning to sever his unsalvageable leg. The blood—get the, cutting through his, his musculature. Everything. Get everything. All of this while the boat rocks. Through the bone. Trying to get back home. Just trying to get home.
Before he dies he wonders if they’ve done it out of spite this time.
In the portrait lies a young man ready to be carved like long pig, hazy lime-green eyes, limbs strewn over the surface of a table. The layers of skin and muscle and fat exposed to the air, although there weren’t much fat to begin with, reds and pinks and yellows and that ominous, shining black, or perhaps it is red, but it’s so dark. It could be soot. His leg was taken out by a cannon, most likely, not that he could remember, with a bullet to the brain and one to the cheek and another in his throat and at least two to a lung.
That’s why you stay on your own ship, he thinks to himself. Like it even applies anymore.
It’s the big, glossy tears that get to him. When he runs his fingers over the portrait they’re all he can feel. He doesn’t remember crying like that. Shiny pink tears to contrast the gray his cheeks had taken on. His knuckles are white. His hands grip his rosary tight.
“Let’s cover it back up.”
(What they won’t know is that he was trying to rip it off.)
“It isn’t what we were searching for anyway.”