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Rodolfo watches her ruin Alejandro.
It starts subtly enough that even he doesn’t notice it. He doesn’t blame himself when he thinks back, not unless he’s drunk and thinking.
She’d left them behind, taking her team and getting all of them out in one piece, uninjured. Because they were the professional ones, and the Vaqueros were the ones stumbling through the smoke, and pulling bandages together as quickly as possible on the plane because bullets hit deep and medical is still so far away.
He knows they fought about it afterwards because Alejandro comes back to their room pissed. Slamming his fist into the door as it shuts.
Rodolfo knows he’s not an aggressive person, not to his friends, but it doesn’t feel that way when Alejandro is taking his hand in his own, inspecting the laceration on his forearm from some unexpected and ill-prepared for hand to hand combat. He’s digging his fingers in, and Rodolfo has to focus to keep from wincing.
“Avoidable. If she’d just-” He trails off in a growl.
“If I’d been quicker.” Rodolfo argues, “I would have been out before I was engaged.”
Alejandro scoffs and tosses his arm back to his chest, getting up to pace the room, restless energy everywhere but on the field. “You were fine. You had no backup.”
And he likes Valeria, and he knows Alejandro loves her, so he defends, “Her unit’s not supposed to be our backup.”
Righteous anger seeps off of the other man, the kind Rodolfo always found magnetic about him, a moral code far up above the clouds. He’s always been terrified that one day Alejandro will stumble across something that breaks it. He doesn’t want to see that. Ever.
“But to leave us, brothers and sisters, behind to fight alone,” Alejandro shakes his head. He’s disappointed but Rodolfo’s heart pulls because he can practically see the love for her radiating around them. Alejandro wants her to be better, wants her to be perfect, wants her to be the physical embodiment of his morals. “It’s not right.”
“We got out of this one.” Rodolfo switches tactics. “She trusts you to get us out safe. It was the right call.”
And Alejandro didn’t want to be mad at her. Even then he could see it. He wanted more than anything for her to be this idol he adored.
He stops pacing. Hand on the wall, breath heaving like part of him still wants to fight but most of him knows he shouldn’t.
“I could go a round of sparring,” Rodolfo offers, forgetting for a moment that he’s still injured. He tries not to draw attention to the bandaged area when the other man looks over. “You look pent up. And you shouldn’t go back and talk to her until you’re not hopped up on adrenaline. We can spar, then you sleep on it, and tomorrow, maybe you tell her that you were just worried. You didn’t say anything unforgivable, right?”
Alejandro shakes his head, “I called her selfish. And heartless. And I just… left.”
“Apologize tomorrow.” Rodolfo tilts his head, “You know she’s none of those things.”
“You’re right.” Alejandro sighs in that tired way he always does when he’s fighting to keep his beliefs and it hurts. “Are you sure you’re alright to spar?” He nods his head at the dressing Rodolfo’s been trying to keep still.
“I’ll be alright,” Rodolfo promises. It’s stupid, and even when he looks back on it he feels stupid, but he can’t help but want to be the one. The one person that lives up to the way Alejandro believes so hard in the world.
He wants him to be right. About everything.
Years later, he still has the scar, a straight line across the back of his forearm, and a thinner split right in the center, where he’d landed hard before it had healed right.
—
Rodolfo had loud siblings; two older brothers, and one younger sister. There’s a sort of approval that comes with being the easiest child. Adults learn quickly that they don’t have to deal with him. He’ll be fine playing by himself when his brothers are preoccupied and his sister is being girly.
There was enough of a gap between him and his brothers that he knew fighting just led to more fighting before he was big enough to give any of it a try. And by the time she was old enough to try her hand at fighting Rodolfo knew he wasn’t supposed to hit his sister. Not that that ever held her back from starting on him.
And even later, any time Louisa had boy troubles, Rafe and Paul would be out chasing him around the block, and every time, his mother would find him drying Louisa’s tears.
There’s a sort of quietness that comes with being the easiest child.
Rodolfo likes that he’s quiet.
Alejandro seems to like it too. Ever his opposite, he seems prepared with a plan or a speech every other moment. The other man has always felt like someone came and scribbled in orange crayon across the calm white page of Rodolfo’s mind. He’s loud, abrasive at times, all too addicting, and larger than life.
Rodolfo wants to follow him to the ends of the earth.
He kept his own heart quiet. Oh, he knew the feeling well. He didn’t deny the way he jumped to work with Alejandro more and more, nor did he deny the way his heart would skip when Alejandro would seek him out with equal fervor. They complement each other well, on and off the field.
It wouldn’t be worth his time to lie about the way he was attached. Just as it wouldn’t be worth his effort to say anything. Alejandro has his love story. And he loves so hard that it’s enough to just see it.
So, Rodolfo watches him love. Toes the line of honest-drunk but never crosses it, takes the friendship he’s offered and treasures it.
He loves him. And he’s okay if it’s only this much.
—
And then she’s gone.
And she…
Rodolfo doesn’t like thinking about when she left. What he’d missed in the confusion.
The door slams open, and in storms Alejandro, back later than he would be if he were coming back to his bed for the night. He doesn’t say a word, even though Rodolfo is awake and the lights are still on, just stalks towards his bed and sits down.
Rodolfo gives him a moment. Because Rodolfo’s quiet, and Alejandro is never quiet.
But he is tonight. And Rodolfo watches, wondering if now is one of the times he can scoop him into his arms and ask him why he’s crying.
There’s a steady stream of silent tears down his cheeks before Rodolfo manages to make a sound.
“Ale?” He murmurs, facing him on his own bed, not sure how close he’ll be allowed. Not sure how close he can allow himself to be without making a mess of things. “Dime”
And when Alejandro looks at him the fire behind his eyes is a candle in a hurricane. He shakes his head slowly, fresh tears rolling uninterrupted down to his chin.
Rodolfo is across the room in a heartbeat, kneeling in front of him, hands taking one of his and pressing his lips to it, “Are you hurt?” He doesn’t look hurt, but Rodolfo pats his arms and legs anyway, checking for anything broken or bruised.
“I cannot say.” Alejandro whispers, stilling his hands. “I promised.”
“Who?” Rodolfo is frantic, switching to wiping his tears away with his thumbs. He’s long past the days of needing his brothers to fight battles, but can’t do so if there’s no enemy to fight, “Who did you promise, querido?”
Alejandro’s lip quivers like he’s about to say. And for a moment, Rodolfo believes he can fix it. Whoever shattered his castle in the sky hadn’t done near enough damage that he couldn’t come, scoop him up, and glue the pieces back together.
But he doesn’t speak. Not one word. Not until morning.
And by then Valeria is long gone.
—-
Rodolfo’s spent a lot of time in his life angry. Little things, sharing toys with Paul, big things, Louise sobbing into his arms about a man she’d met while he was deployed.
Anger never got him very far.
And none of that helps Alejandro.
It has to be some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, the way he stands close enough for Alejandro to hurt the both of them on his way down.
Rodolfo’s quiet.
Not as quiet as he’s been in the past. Certainly loud enough when he needs to be. But his core is still the core of the boy who’d spent more time loving than fighting, and he loves Alejandro. So much.
So when Alejandro tries to turn in on himself, becoming a twister of anger and hurt, he’s there to hurl ripped-apart buildings at.
“You should have been out faster than that, Sergeant.” Alejandro snarls, in front of his troops on the evac plane, “We wasted bullets waiting. Don’t let it happen again.”
“Sergeant Major,” Rodolfo corrects, standing strong. He knows only one of them is, “And it won’t.”
He picks up the slack falling from Alejandro’s hands. Placing it back even as more falls. He doesn’t judge, he’d seen his brothers fall off harder ledges than this one. He’s seen giants fall before.
Slowly, painfully, he watches as Alejandro twists until he's just a life-sized man with a hole in his heart. And Rodolfo makes himself the quiet pair of hands beside him to close the bottle and tell him to sleep the rest of the drink off.
It’s in those months that he thinks he finally kills the feelings he’d been starving for so long. He doesn’t want this he’d tell himself. Not the scarred remains of the man no longer larger than life.
And maybe he did. Maybe that night was the only time he had.
Alejandro’s drunk. He can smell it on his breath when he walks in.
Alejandro’s hurting. Harder to tell. Easy for Rodolfo. The way he’s blinking his eyes twice every time. The way he joins Rodolfo on his bed instead of going back to his own.
The way he presses his palm to his face and kisses him on the jaw, whispering, “You could love me, couldn’t you?”
Rodolfo smiles gently, though his urge is to cry, “I do love you, carnal.”
He never knows if it was the right or the wrong thing to say. Alejandro, turning his face, why does he let him turn his face? Why can’t he ever-
Alejandro tasted like tears. And his lips were so soft. And then, almost as quickly, he tasted like whiskey. And he was biting.
And Rodolfo knows. They don’t love each other enough for this to be anything but painful.
And when Alejandro tries to stumble further, pulling at him like a lover, he dries his own tears on his shirt while he lays the other man back, and presses kiss after kiss to his mouth.
When he realizes he’s not going to be getting laid, Alejandro stops, still and suddenly shy. “Why don’t you want me?” He rasps. He’s crying again.
And Rodolfo wants to say he does. He wants to bring up years of quiet adoration. He wants to press kisses to the deepest parts of Alejandro until he’s whole again. But this isn’t what he needs. And Rodolfo once wanted the way Alejandro loves with everything he is, but this isn’t that.
“Not like this.” He presses a kiss to his forehead before rolling off of him, and then the bed, entirely.
He sleeps in Alejandro’s bed that night, as Alejandro sleeps in his. And he thinks that they’ve been in the wrong beds for forever but switching still fixes nothing.
—
Try as he does, every time he reminds himself how he got here, he can’t tell when it shifted.
Oh, he sees when Alejandro stops drinking. Four full months sober entirely before he goes back to only having a few. And he sticks with that.
He sees when the fire returns. It’s mid-battle, and suddenly it’s not the tired man he’d fallen in love with, it’s the brave one, with aspirations and goals, building his belief in the world back up brick by heavy fucking brick.
It’s like watching grass grow after an apocalypse. Knocks the wind out of him.
—
And then there’s now.
And Rodolfo’s quiet. More attuned to watching than to being watched. So he doesn’t see when Alejandro starts listening.
It’s quiet. He’s telling him about his siblings, the way they -as all siblings did- tried to make each other's lives living hell, and all the ways he loves them for it. “Well, Rafe was chasing him across the road, so of course, Paul had to run out too. And Louise was going to chase after the three of them, even with her arm still in a cast. So, of course, I’m trying to hold her back…” He trails off laughing, trying to remember the rest of the story and why he’d started it in the first place.
Alejandro laughs along with him, but it sounds strange, the sort of fully at ease laugh Rodolfo hasn’t heard from him in what feels like forever. When he goes quiet, curiosity piqued, waiting for the other man to talk and all to be the same with the world, Alejandro ducks his head, fiddling with Rodolfo’s hand, “Do you love from a distance all the time?”
It’s a question. And it’s an apology. Have you been loving me all this time and I never saw it?
“All the time.” Rodolfo breathes. He turns, and Alejandro is smiling softly, looking at him not like he sees a perfect representation of everything he believes in, but like he sees a perfect representation of Rodolfo and likes that just as much.
“And if I asked you,” Alejandro brings his hand up to alight on his cheek and Rodolfo tilts his face to press firmer into his palm, “Could you love me, here? Closer?”
Rodolfo finds that of the answering and kissing him paths, one is much more important. He half tackles, half scoops up Alejandro from where they’re sitting, wrapping him in his arms, almost picking him up off the ground.
“Could I- Alejandro-” He splutters for another moment before giving up entirely and finally fitting his lips to the other man’s. Chances are, he’s already figured it all out.
Immediately he realizes that they’re both smiling too hard for the kiss to be any good, but that doesn’t deter him from pressing kiss after kiss to Alejandro’s lips until the other man is blushing and waving his hands.
“Rudy, Rudy, despacio, cielo.” He murmurs, and then he has Rodolfo’s face in both of his hands, kissing him so slowly he gets the kind of shivers that only caramel candies can bring out; sticky sweet and fucking perfect.
Kissing Alejandro is like swimming for hours, and Rodolfo is trying very hard not to pant as he pulls back, breathless. His eyes are closed still, relying on how close he remains to feel Alejandro’s smile.
“See,” Alejandro’s voice is a warm puff of air across his lips and no louder, “Just stay here, and kiss me.”
Rodolfo won’t know until years later, what his staying means. But he does. And he kisses him.