#that I’m able to have a normal life and think about him minimally and painlessly

[twinklingwatermellon]

Hmm

[wee-chlo]

Everything Is Going To Be Okay: A Villain AU AU, Part 1

Inspired by @im-fairly-whitty and @slusheeduck ‘s  Villain AU, a heartwarming tale about family and love and- hahahaha I’m kidding, it’s tragedy.

When Miguel Rivera, the great-great-grandson of esteemed and beloved musician Héctor Rivera, was twelve, he was cursed and went to the Land of the Dead. There, he discovered the truth about his family’s bloody, crime-speckled past. Convincing Hector that he intended to keep the secret, he was sent home… and now, fifteen years later, he’s back.

This is a happy ending, but happy endings aren’t necessarily good ones.

Rated PG13 this particular chapter for mentions of suicidal ideation it’ll cool down to something closer to PG/G in coming chapters.

Miguel Rivera, great-great-grandson of the esteemed and beloved musician Héctor Rivera, died alone in his sleep when he was twenty-seven. He hadn’t been a public figure for nearly a decade and had been estranged from most of his family. Friends were relatively few, and so it took almost two days for his body to be discovered in his apartment in Monterrey, Mexico.

At first, the common theory was suicide. Rumors about what had happened to him on that Día de los Muertos fifteen years ago still churned and rumbled despite the family’s attempts to quiet lingering doubts about the official story. Word in the tabloids was that Miguel suffered from night terrors, panic attacks, and fits. There was a rumor that he was a paranoid schizophrenic, that he’d attacked his family and been disowned for it, that he was a dangerous predator that the family was trying to protect. No matter how many magazines and paparazzi were sued for libel and slander, another would crop up with something new, something even more salacious and hurtful.

Coco knew better.

She knew her brother, even if the calls had become more infrequent and the visits to the Rivera home had stopped when she was twelve. Her brother wasn’t dangerous, wasn’t crazy. Just… scared. She didn’t know why. He never talked about that night he disappeared and then reappeared at dawn, hysterical and sobbing. No matter how many therapists their parents had sent him to, no matter how many times the topic was broached, he remained tight-lipped about it, allowing people to come to their own dramatic conclusions.

He’d left home when he turned eighteen. Coco had been six, but had very dim, half-baked memories of her brother and parents arguing about it. He visited on her birthday, Christmas, and up until she was about twelve, he visited for Día de los Muertos. Then, one year, he said he wasn’t coming back.

The memory of that argument wasn’t vague or half-baked. Sometimes she thought her ears still rang with her Abuelita’s outraged yelling. The phone had been slammed down so hard it cracked and after that, Miguel was the black sheep. Coco, Mama and Papa had received calls, letters, emails, but no visits. Sometimes, he’d call the house and ask to speak to Abuelita, but she’d never take the call.

In the last year before his death, he, Coco, and his parents had engaged in a long and complicated game of phone tag. Instead of direct conversations, they’d leave messages to each other. Coco got the impression that Miguel did it on purpose, deliberately calling when he knew they wouldn’t be able to answer so that there wouldn’t need to be a conversation. In the weeks afterward, she listened to his last voicemail over and over and over.

Hey, sorry I missed you. Uh, everything’s fine up here. Keep an eye out in the mail, yeah? Your birthday present should be getting there soon. Tell Mama and Papa I love them, and, uh… tell Abuelita that too, okay? Love you. Bye.

When they first got the news that he was dead, it had sounded like a suicide note. Apparently, they’d found quite a few in his apartment from varying times. The autopsy said otherwise. Miguel had been on medications: Valium, Ambien, fentanyl, and lexapro. He’d had alcohol in his system, not a lot but enough to indicate that he’d drank some the night before. And he’d had a genetic heart condition. The mix of long-term anxiety and insomnia, combined with the medication and alcohol, had killed him silently and painlessly in the night. A freak accident. A tragedy.

The landlady had sent Miguel’s things to the Rivera household. Most of it would be given away or donated: clothing, bedding, kitchenware. But among the rubble of her brother’s life was a little box of evidence proving every stupid mumbler wrong: notebooks full of songs and music, old photos, a laptop with a family photo as the lock screen.

A shoebox filled with printouts and copies of every email and letter that the family had sent to them. Every Christmas card, every birthday letter. Clippings of the things that Rosa and Abel had been doing, the review of Rosa’s first play and Abel’s second album.

They hadn’t sent the suicide notes. Apparently, those were being kept until suicide could be officially ruled out. But buried in the box of letters sent to him was a letter he’d written but not yet sent. It made the bottom drop out of Coco’s stomach.

I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore, he wrote, his handwriting shaky and cramped. I feel like I’m just wasting time for nothing. I could be with you all, and instead, I’m doing this. And it’s pointless because I’m not even going to do anything with it.

Just destroy that stupid laptop, would you? Nothing in there worth talking about anyway.

--

Miguel Rivera woke up dead.

Slowly, things came into focus. He was warm, bundled up in soft blankets. He heard something very distantly: voices, muffled and soft as if through water at first, then crystallizing.

“Should it take this long? I feel like it shouldn’t take this long.”

“The doctor said it’s normal for people who die that way. Calm down, mi amor.”

The voices were familiar. One he’d only heard from video clips and old newsreels but the other…

Pepita? Take care of him, will you?

He jerked away with a gasp, the memory knocking him out of the in-between state and back to… back to…

Oh.

His brain seemed to work in sections, processing things bit by bit, clunky even after the sudden rush of emotion that had hit him like electricity. He was in bed that wasn’t his, in a room that wasn’t his. The walls were sage and pastel yellow, the decoration minimal and sterile. Sunlight flushed in from an open window to his left, and to his right were two well-dressed skeletons, greying dark hair immaculately styled, their clothing tasteful, their expressions equal parts concern and shock. One was a woman with long hair, dressed in elegant purple, who could only be Mama Imelda. Sitting next to her…

“Hola, Papa Héctor,” Miguel said, the words sounding thick and clumsy to his own… ears? “Been awhile.”

“Migue,” Papa Héctor said warmly, reaching out and taking Miguel’s hand in his. “Oh, m’ijo, it’s so good to see you. I wish you’d taken a bit longer though…” He sighed, giving Miguel’s hand a squeeze. The feel of it was strange, bone rubbing on bone. The sight made old memories dredge up again, and he had to fight down the urge to wrench his hand free.

“But you’re here,” Mama Imelda said, sitting on the bed next to him. “You’ve been here for almost a day now, recovering. And you’ll need to recover for a while longer still.”

“A day?” Miguel’s head felt like it was full of gauze and cotton, even as his thoughts began to move at a steadier pace.

“You died in your sleep, chamaco,” Papa Héctor said quietly, shaking his head and looking so sad, like his heart was breaking. “Ay, Migue… It’s good to see you, but it didn’t have to be like this. It didn’t have to be this soon.”

Miguel couldn’t bring himself to say anything. It was too surreal. Dying in your sleep is what old people did, people who’d lived until they were in their seventies, eighties, nineties. It’s how Mama Coco had died, and Papa Julio. You don’t die in your sleep before you’re thirty. That’s not how it works.

“We’ve been so worried about you, m’ijo,” Mama Imelda said, cutting through the fog of confusion. “You stopped coming home for Día de los Muertos, you didn’t have an ofrenda up. No one knew what was happening. There was talk about you hurting yourself. We didn’t know what you would do…” She trailed off, and when Miguel looked up, she was giving him a rather pointed look. It took a moment for Miguel to realize what she was getting at but when he did, he almost laughed in their faces, it was so ridiculous.

“Go ahead. Ask. I won’t get mad or anything,” he said.

Héctor and Imelda shared a glance, and then she said, “The book.”

The words fell between them with all the delicacy of a pair of rocks. Miguel gently pulled his hand free of Héctor’s and peered at it. Funny, the joints didn’t look like they did in the biology books.

“Wasn’t much of a book,” he said, his voice sounding funny and distant. “Mostly notes. Newspaper articles. I got a couple of autopsy reports, but I had to be careful, you know? I didn’t know how picky the curse was and if I popped up back here… might have been a little awkward.” He couldn’t make eye contact with them. He didn’t know what they’d do, or say, or think. He’d had this whole speech prepared for years, worked on it every single spare moment, but now here he was and instead of something mature and reasonable, words just came out like vomit.

“You were good, I’ll give you that. Damn good. I mean, once I knew what the thought process was, I could catch the names. But then it just opened this whole new thing. I mean, how many victims, for instance? Don’t even know. Depends on how generous you’re feeling, I guess. Might be ten. Might be dozens. Sure, you might not have killed every one of them but it’s not like people didn’t throw themselves off of bridges or drink themselves to death after you dragged their careers so far into the muck that they couldn’t break out.”

“Miguel-” Héctor’s tone was almost pleading, but Miguel had been waiting for this moment since he was twelve and no one was going to stop it now, not even Héctor Rivera. He still couldn’t look at them, but there wasn’t much else to look at. He flopped back onto the bed and focused on a crack in the ceiling.

“But you know, I could never prove anything. You were damn good. I could never prove a thing. I just… knew enough to keep me up at night. Enough to make me feel sick. I couldn’t stand to be there anymore, in that house. I had to get out of there, but hey, can’t say anything because if I do, poof,” he made a tiny explosion gesture with his hands, the bones clicking together. “Back here. With you. So what else was I supposed to do? What was I supposed to do? Just pretend I didn’t know and everything was fine? Pretend like Ernesto De La Cruz didn’t exist-”

“That bestia doesn’t deserve your pity, Miguel,” Imelda said firmly, standing up from the bed. “He’s gone and done with now, and the world is the better for it.”

“Maybe,” Miguel admitted. “I wish they were all like that, I really do. I wish it was all that easy, but they didn’t all have to die. It’s like you just… got used to it.”

“Miguel,” Héctor said, his voice quieter now but firmer. “We never did things like that lightly. It was never for lack of trying anything else or going different routes. We did what we had to do for our family, to keep our children and their children safe.” He sighed. “You said you understood that.”

“I was twelve,” Miguel snapped back at the ceiling. “And I’d just watched you gloat about murdering someone and then watched that some person get snatched by a giant glowing cat monster. I lied.”

The silence that followed was heavy and dark. Miguel didn’t know how a heart that didn’t exist could still be pounding but he could feel it rattling his ribcage, felt himself tremble despite the blankets tucked around him.

“Miguel, look at me.” Miguel gritted his teeth, gaze fixed upwards. “Miguel.” The note of warning reminded him so much of his own father that he turned instinctively.

Imelda was standing behind where Héctor stood, her hands resting on his shoulders. They made a striking pair, he had to admit. Like something out of a Gothic romance, stark and dark and resolute. Like a painting of a king and his queen standing in judgment.

“We need to know that you can be trusted, Miguel,” Héctor said, folding his hands in front of him. “You’ve… spent a lot of time on this. And we know you never said anything when you were alive. But we need to know that that’s going to continue.”

“And if it isn’t?” Miguel asked, knowing the answer, and knowing his own. Héctor sighed again, and Miguel thought he saw Imelda’s hands tighten their grip on his shoulders.

“Then it’s the same as before, Miguel. You stay with us and we keep an eye on you until we know you understand.” Miguel blinked. “We’re not going to hurt you, Miguel,” Héctor said, sounding absurdly exasperated, as if he wasn’t talking to someone who knew exactly what he was capable of. “You’re our family. We love you, and we want you to be happy. We want you to be here, with your family. We want you to come home. But we can’t let everything this family built-”

“I’m not going to say anything.”

Héctor stuttered to a stop.

“I’m not,” Miguel said again. “I wish I was lying. I really do. I wish I never met Ernesto De La Cruz. I wish I never knew anything about all the things you’ve done. I wish…” He felt a lump form in his throat, which was so stupid because he didn’t even have one anymore, and when he spoke again, it came out a cracking croak. “I wish I could love you the way everyone else does. I wish I was going to…” Miguel whispered. Before he couldn’t bring himself to look at Héctor, but now he couldn’t bring himself to look away. He wished it didn’t feel as good as it did to finally get to talk, because it was Héctor, but Miguel had been alone for so damn long…

“I wish I was going to say something. But I’m not. Because… because I don’t want anyone else to feel the way I do. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand how dirty I feel. I couldn’t do that to anyone else. I couldn’t. I’m not…” He closed his eyes, covered his face, blotted out the horror on Papa Héctor’s face, the grief on Mama Imelda’s. “I’m not strong enough.”

“No, no, Migue, no,” Papa Héctor said, all the sternness and firmness gone like fog to sunlight, and Miguel felt him slip an arm around to pull him up into a sitting position. Papa Héctor’s hand gripped Miguel’s shoulder, pulled him closer so that he was in a half-hug, and it was enough to make Miguel shatter like so much glass.

“I just wanna go home,” he sobbed, curling into a ball against Papa Héctor’s chest. “I don’t wanna do this anymore, I don’t, I don’t-”

“It’s okay, m’ijo,” Mama Imelda’s hand touched his back, ran up and down his spine soothingly. “You don’t have to. You’ve been so strong, Migue. This isn’t weakness. It’s the right thing. You’re protecting your family. You’re home now.”

Home. With family. People who cared. People who’d loved each other.

People who’d killed for each other.

“It’s over, Miguel,” Papa Héctor said, tucking Miguel under his chin. Miguel felt Mama Imelda press closer, wrapping her arms around him and Papa Héctor both, a secure embrace. “It’s done.”

There was a time when Miguel thought that those words would be a gavel coming down. He hadn’t expected them to be a promise, aching with apology and forgiveness and love.

Papa Héctor’s hand smoothed back his hair carefully, and Miguel felt a distinctly foreign sort of drowsiness fall over him like a blanket. He relaxed by inches until he was putty in their arms, listening to Papa Héctor hum something aimless and soothing.

He wished he was stronger. He wished he had more of a backbone, more guts. He wished he was strong enough to make the hard choice, the painful choice. But really, it had never been a choice at all.

“Get some rest, Miguel.” Mama Imelda’s voice was warm and loving. “We can talk more later.”

[ferociousqueak]

Okay, so @bloomingcnidarians asked about how my Cassandra Shepard and Thane got together, and I have criminally little written on them, so I decided it was time to rectify that :D

#

It doesn’t happen right away.

In all honesty, there’s something about Thane that bothers Cassandra at first. He’s so . . . still. In her experience, the only people that still are predators, killers. But then, he admits it, completely unabashed. He’s a killer. Just like she is.

So why does that get to her?

It would be cliché to say he’s a mystery she needs to solve, so she doesn’t say it. Also, it’s not true. Thane is many things, but a mystery isn’t one of them. He’s open. Honest. Forthright. She could ask him any question and trust the answer he gave her, even—especially—if it’s not something she’d prefer to hear.

After a while, it’s like she goes to Life Support out of muscle memory. She stands for only a moment as the elevator door opens. To the left: a stoic warrior who would kill her without remorse if she knew even half the things Cassandra had done. To the right: a stoic warrior who would kill her without remorse for a sufficient paycheck.

It wasn’t so easy in the beginning. The first time she went to see him, it was an exploratory mission. She would be able to tell if he was lying, and if he didn’t meet her standards of trustworthiness, she’d kill him herself. Cassandra had already died once. She preferred not to do it again.

As frustrating and unexpected as it was, he was unerringly honest. He admitted to his role in his wife’s death. He didn’t try to justify his absence from his son’s life. But something still ate at Cassandra.

“How can you say it’s not your fault,” she said one day.

Thane tilted his head at her as his secondary eyelids blinked. “What is supposed to be my fault, siha?”

“Don’t call me that,” she sneered. “You’ve killed more people than you can count. You haven’t even bothered to count them. How can you say their deaths aren’t your fault?”

He nodded. “Their deaths are not your fault, Commander.”

She shook her head and rubbed two fingers against her temple. “I’m not talking about me, Krios. I’m talking about you.”

“Of course, Commander.” He paused and hummed, considering his next words. “The hanar trained me to kill effectively. Mercifully. I fulfilled my first contract when I was twelve.” He took a deep breath. “Looking back, I was too young for that assignment. But I didn’t know better. All I knew was that the people taking care of me needed me. Even if the way they needed me wasn’t . . . conventional.”

Cassandra snorted. “Even a kid knows what’s right and wrong.”

Thane nodded again. “They do. A child also knows what’s necessary. He knows what he needs to do, not just to keep his room and board, but to maintain the affection of those who keep him. And those who keep him know this much.” He paused for a long moment before continuing. “If the ones who keep him direct him to behave in a way he wouldn’t have normally . . . the responsibility is with them, not him.”

“That’s bullshit,” Cassandra said, almost without pause.

“Is it, Commander,” Thane said, tilting his head further. “If a child is about to starve and she does something unfortunate to stay alive, who is at fault? The child, or the person who asked the child to do the unfortunate thing, knowing full well what the stakes are?”

Cassandra pushed away from the table and stood, pacing the small space. “Of course the child isn’t responsible,” she said. “But eventually that child becomes an adult. They can make decisions for themselves.”

“Yes,” Thane agreed. “They can make decisions. Including taking contracts that kill people.” He leaned forward and pressed his mouth against his clasped hands. “There will always be people who can’t do their own killing. I can offer a service that both achieves the inevitable and affords the target minimal pain and discomfort.” He turned his gaze toward Cassandra. “I might kill professionally, Commander. That does not mean I enjoy it.”

Cassandra continued to pace. How could he . . . how did he think . . . no. If you killed a person, you were responsible. End of story. Trying to say otherwise was an equivocation. A justification. She was responsible. No. He was responsible. He’d been paid to kill people and he’d done it.

“You could’ve said no at any point,” she said, her arms crossed as she carefully looked away from him.

“That’s true,” Thane agreed. “And I could’ve starved at any point. I could’ve alienated myself from anyone who meant anything to me at any point.”

Cassandra finally looked at Thane. “Yeah? Do you think Kolyat would buy what you’re selling.”

Thane started, visibly taken aback by her words, and she immediately regretted them. “That’s not,” she shook her head and looked away. “I mean . . .”

“You said what you meant, Commander,” he said. Already, she felt a twinge in her chest that almost felt like she missed him calling her siha. God, why did she want to hear him call her that? “It’s a fair question.” He paused as he considered his answer. “I suspect Kolyat would be as suspicious as you are. That’s not something I can control.”

Cassandra wanted to take the question back. She didn’t want Thane thinking that . . . she wasn’t sure what she didn’t want him thinking. She’d upset him, that much was clear, and she didn’t like how that made her feel.

“What I mean to say,” he said after a moment, “is that it’s not your fault, Commander.”

Cassandra stopped and turned toward him, unable to move toward the empty chair across from him.

“You have spent a significant part of your life . . . what is it humans say? Taking out the garbage for people who had no respect for you,” he said. “But just because they had no respect for you, doesn’t mean you don’t deserve it.” He paused again. “You deliver death, that’s true. But you do not relish it. It is something you deliver quickly, cleanly, and painlessly. That’s something to be admired, siha. I apologize. Commander.”

She sighed. She could get used to the nickname, if she was being honest, and didn’t correct him.

Cassandra couldn’t look at Thane. She wanted to sit across from him and look him in the eyes, but she didn’t want to sit. She needed to bleed off the energy building up inside her. “I just need to . . . I need to think.”

Thane caught her hand as she moved past him. He didn’t lean forward. He didn’t look at her with any kind of smoky gaze. He just ran his thumb down her palm and across her wrist and focused anywhere that didn’t meet her eyes.

“That’s good, Commander,” he said, his eyes still on the hand he held. “Taking the time to know one’s own thoughts is important.”

“Siha,” she said before she realized it. Thane looked up at her and she felt her heart jump. “It’s okay if you call me siha.”

Thane nodded and pressed his thumb against her palm before leaning back again.

After a moment, she slowly pulled her hand back. Without a word, she headed toward the door. Something inside her was . . . still. She hadn’t felt that before.

She needed to figure it out.