Chapter Text
Javier Peña certainly isn’t a soft man. With all he’s seen and done, and still has left to see and do, there’s no way in hell he can be soft. Blood and death and fear, it drags at his bones, weighs him down, so hard and heavy that some days he fleetingly imagines the sweet relief of never having to get out of bed again. It’s endless, the violence, the screams, the gunshots he hears and the gunshots he causes, and he’s tired, he’s so tired.
He’s not a soft man, but he tries his best to be a kind man. There’s too much cruelty in the world, too much ugliness, and he’s meant to be stopping it, and while it feels like he’s not succeeding much at work, he can try in other ways. The young woman on the corner who sells fresh fruit with a baby on her hip – he only buys his fruit from her, because he can see the exhaustion and the desolation, “Hola, mi reinita, cómo estás hoy?” and she’ll give him tired, pretty smiles and an extra mango and he makes sure to give her extra pesos and tries to give a smile of his own, familiar in the way of passing strangers –
The old woman with the tienda de abarrotes, one letter hanging on by only a nail, who wrangles her grandsons into helping her every afternoon when they return from collegio, still in their uniforms – he gets as much as he can with her store, flirting with her for sake of the smiles that glow bright and unabashed on her face, for sake of hearing the grandsons giggle at him as they bag his items, and one time they’d asked to wear his aviators and of course he’d let them, and when he’d returned later in the week, they’d each had their own pair sitting on their heads, their smiles proud and eager as they showed him, their abuela giving him a soft look of thanks, and he still isn’t sure for what she was thanking him, but he accepted with a nod and kiss on her cheek because it soothed something ragged and bloody inside him –
The prostitute on across town he stumbled across on a chase, face battered, legs bloody, and he’d already lost the man he’d been chasing, and so it really wasn’t much of a decision to slip the gun into the waistband of his jeans and pivot back to face her – she’d flinched from him, because in the darkness, physical and otherwise, all men were the same monster, and he slowed and crouched, making himself as small as possible, “Vos ayudó?” and she’d been shaking, tears dripping down her cheeks, silent and hopeless, and anger had shattered his heart and burned icy in his veins as she finally nodded her head, as she let him pull her into a half-dead motel and into the shower, stripping her slowly, pressing her under the warm water, washing the tears and blood away, stopping her hands as she reached for his belt buckle, “No vos preocupe por eso,” and the gratitude in her eyes and voice and tears made his shattered heart crumble to ash –
He’s not a soft man by any means, hardly even a gentle man, but he tries, he tries, and sitting on the steps of the apartment building, cigarette forgotten and dying in between his fingers, he wonders why. Is it even worth it? For all the good he tries to do, does anyone notice? Does it make a difference in the world? Why does he try so hard if it hardly even matters? Bone-weary and endlessly heavy, he takes a drag from the cigarette, eyes staring at the building across the street and not seeing it.
Somewhere upstairs, Steve is drinking without Connie, because Connie fucking left, and Javier understands why but he can’t help the cold, tired anger. How dare she break Steve like that? How dare she hurt his partner in that way? How dare –
It’s a worn, familiar spiral he’s on, and he almost welcomes it, almost greets it like an old friend, almost –
Sound startles him from the dark reverie, his hand immediately falling to the gun tucked at the small of his back. His heartbeat is painful against his ribs, adrenaline bitter and well-acquainted, but nothing is moving in the shadows, and his cigarette is nothing more than an ember on the ground where he dropped it. He relaxes his grip on his gun, and the sound clatters again.
He moves with the shadows, fading into them with ease of practice, breathing regulated and silent, footsteps slow and careful, and the clattering stops again, but he’s already there, and when he looks –
Eyes that glow yellow-green in the flickering streetlights, and Javier releases a quick, harsh breath. A cat. Just a fucking cat, and he closes his eyes and tucks the gun back into his waistband. He can see better now, and notes the torn ear, the missing tooth, the way the thing is crouched low, tail flicking –
He doesn’t know cats, but he knows scars, and he can see the mistreatment near dripping from the cat. Grizzled and grey and guarded, painfully thin beneath the layers of fur, and when he looks at the trash bin, he notes the empty cans of food the thing must have been scavenging through.
They stay like that, staring at each other, sizing each other up, and Javier doesn’t know if it’s the fact that he knows what it is to be as worn out and beat down as the thing looks, or if it’s the fact that it isn’t running from him, or if it’s the fact that he’s operating on insomnia and anger at the world, but he crouches down, folding in on himself, making himself small and unthreatening – trust me, he wants to say, I won’t hurt you.
Someone else has. He can see it in the way the cat lowers itself to the ground, fur spiking, lips pulling back in a growl. He can see it in the odd, furless spots on its body, as if it’d been tormented for fun – he knows anger like this, reserved for the worst people, and it’s not something he truly has the energy to take on but, but –
The cat’s nose twitches, and the fur settles somewhat, and it doesn’t do anything more than stretch itself a little closer, until Javier can feel its whiskers tickling the hard callouses of his fingers, and he thinks that maybe if he reaches out just a little further – the movement startles the thing away from him, fur spiking once more, lips curling to reveal only one canine, and then it disappears into the shadows.
He lowers his hand and sighs, if it doesn’t work, why does he even try?
Except the next night he hears the clatter again, and this time he grabs some leftover chicken before moving into the alley, and though the ragged, street-worn thing doesn’t let him near enough to touch, he doesn’t run, either.
They develop a truce, a familiarity, like the one he has with the girl on the corner and the abuelita in the tienda, and it becomes pattern and habit to sit outside in the dark and watch the world with bleary eyes and wait for the cat to make its appearance. It becomes something familiar, like the blood and bullets and death, but this is softer, this is welcome, because maybe it truly doesn’t matter what he’s doing, but it’s nice to feel like it does.
In the laboured, expectant darkness of the city, the habit with the grizzled thing is unexpected and soul-soothing. It feels good to watch was it begins to trust him, until it starts eating with him standing right there. It feels good to watch those odd marks on the cat heal, fur beginning to grow back. It feels good to be able to see, if only for a few minutes each evening, that maybe he can actually help the world.
Until one night, the cat doesn’t show up, and Javier waits and almost paces and smokes more cigarettes in a single sitting than he usually does in half a day, and there’s something hard and crushing in his chest, because he knows what happens to street animals, and usually he can’t take the time or energy to care, but this one, world-worn and wary, this one is one he cares about, more than he’d expected – and he almost gives up, almost takes the plate of food back upstairs when the shadows move in the corner.
He turns, hand on his gun, and the cat limps out of the shadows, trailing blood and pain and exhaustion, and he can’t breathe for the fury, cold and hard and horrible, who would dare – how could someone be so cruel –
The cat stops a meter away, and Javier crouches down, putting the plate of food out, I’m still your friend, he wants to say, you can trust me, and his heart is cracking and fading at the reminder of just how absolutely awful this world is. It doesn’t move closer but it doesn’t move away, and Javier inches towards it, holding his breath, you can trust me, you can trust me –
It flinches from his hand when his fingers first brush over soft, dirty fur, but it doesn’t run, it doesn’t run, and that feels like some sort of accomplishment, some sort of something good, and when he picks it up, so careful, so aware of the injuries, it melts against him.
Soft and warm and trusting, letting him protect it, letting him take care of it, and if his heart was cracked this almost makes his heart stitch back together. Almost.
It tucks its head under his chin, pressing against it, whiskers brushing his neck, paws draped over his shoulders. There’s something there, and if he were a less cynical man, he would think that maybe it’s hope, maybe it’s proof that he can do good things in this world. His arms wrap around the cat, supporting it and tucking it close, I’ve got you, you can trust me, I won’t hurt you.
Somewhere between flickering streetlights and burned out cigarettes, between the blood and bullets and violence, he shakes off enough of that bone-crushing exhaustion, cradling the cat to his chest and moving back up to his apartment. Somewhere between the daily darkness, there’s something soft in his arms and soothing in his mind as he carefully dabs iodine and water on the injuries.
Big blue eyes blink up at him as he washes the dirt and blood away, grey fur weighed down by the water, ears entirely too big for the face, and Javier feels his lips curl upwards slightly. Cute. Water-logged and world-worn and he huffs quiet laughter.
Somewhere between desolation and tired anger, in his dark apartment, he cradles a creature as battle-fatigued as he is, fur spiked ridiculously with water, wounds no longer oozing blood, and there’s a sense of trust, of safety. He’s not a soft man, he hardly knows how to be a gentle one, but he tries to be kind, and often he doubts that it makes any sort of difference in this hard, ugly world – the woman with her fruit, the abuela with her nietos, the prostitute with her tears – but sometimes, sometimes he gets a moment of reprieve.
Sometimes, he gets a cat, wrapped in a towel and pressing its head against his chin as he sits on his sofa, staring blankly at the TV, wondering if maybe, maybe he really can bring some goodness into the world. The cat starts vibrating, a low, rumbling purr moving through its entire body and into him, and the shattered pieces of his heart slowly crawl back together, the ragged edges of his soul softening for just a moment.
Sometimes, he remembers what it is to breathe easy.