Work Text:
Death rejected El Desperado as strongly as El Desperado rejected Death; a flameless cremation, a graveless burial.
He should have burned. He didn’t.
The black river lapped at his bare feet again, oozing between his calloused toes and biting the raw flesh beneath his broken nails. He was wounded yet did not bleed, the shadows pouring out of him sinking into the river, weaving through the current between the paws of the dogs. Frostbiting flames licked his cheeks, nuzzled under his jaw, circled around his head and between every split strand of hair. The black dog sat across the river from him, his back turned to Desperado, long tail tugged by the flow of the water. After many hours, the dog turned his head and glared over his shoulder, heterochromatic eyes piercing Desperado’s. The torch held in his maw was unlit.
The world swam dark and Desperado woke in a bed of elaborately woven brocades, clad only in camisa and pantalones of woven cuyuscate, the flames, now embers, cooled into their usual máscara.
He failed to cross the river again.
Hauling himself up, he wrapped himself in a manta of intricate design selected from the nest beneath him, and resumed his search for his grave.
-
Another battle testing him, another jaguar sinking her teeth into his scarred flesh, another empty burial site exhumed. Life did not want him, either.
-
The cenote is deep, yet not wide, the water cerulean blue and clearer than the misty air. Everything is green or blue or stone with little in between and, from where Desperado crouches at the brink of the yawning pit, he can see the skeleton of the dog at the bottom of the basin. For a long while, El Desperado crouches there, learning the sounds of the water and birds and insects. Night falls rapidly, the darkness all encompassing save for the moon shining directly upon the cenote. The water shimmers. He squints, hands on his knees, leaning forwards.
“I swear… I saw it move.”
-
The skeleton lifts its head.
The torch slot between its barren fangs is lit, burning underwater.
-
El Desperado dives into the depths of the cenote, hands reaching, flames cradling his face.
-
They buried the dog but never found his bones, never interned him.
-
At the black river’s edge, a man stands before him, brows furrowed, eyes enraged above the máscara of solid shadows clutching the lower half of his face. He drops the lit torch and lunges-
-the black dog’s fangs sink into his shoulder, choking on shadow, dragging Desperado into the boiling hot ice water, heaving him against the current, drowning him, buoying him. El Desperado clings to handfuls of long, silky fur, fingers slipping. He sinks deeper.
-
They don’t cross the river.
Douki thrashes him awake in the shallows of the cenote, beating water from his lungs, pounding his heart to beating, shouting at him. El Desperado bleeds bright red blood.