結果太長，只好加開😉

Chapter 5: Five Months Ago Part Two

Now, though—and this is so much harder, so much more terrible, than any delusion—Nacho realizes that it had nothing to do with Fring. Never did. All of that came after, retroactive rationalization of reckless action. No. Lalo left ambiguity. Nacho created certainty. With full intent, full participation and full consent, Nacho wanted Lalo. Wants Lalo.

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It mortifies him thoroughly, looking back, how close he came to tipping over, falling fully, entirely, unraveled by nothing more than careful attention, attentive care. For Lalo—by Lalo.

It mortifies him more that even with this final itch scratched, with nowhere else to go, he keeps wanting, wanting even more, now, the process of addiction so simple, so effective, working the same every time. The body will always do what it does.

Chapter 6: Five Months Ago Part Three

It is becoming harder and harder to forget once they button their pants back up, put their shirts back on, return to the real world, just how good Lalo makes him feel.

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Away from the party like this, with nobody interested in their whereabouts, Nacho feels more comfortable, which in turn irritates him. It's as if he's a shadow passing between mirrors, never able to stay in one place, always at odds with where he is at the moment. Always feeling the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Watch the party for information for Fring; mingle with all the men Lalo wants him to meet; stand outside and smoke with Lalo, facing away from the pretensions of the party. The landscape in the distance, picked for the most perfect view, even that fake, manufactured, but better than whatever waits for him inside the building.

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Nacho is there as a satellite in Lalo's charismatic orbit, something that exists only in connection to the central star.

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Nacho wants to leap at Lalo, tear the smugness off his face. Wants to ask Lalo who he thinks Nacho is, what he thinks Nacho is. Wants to ask him when they're supposed to start doing business, if they're even going to do business at all, or if Nacho is here as Lalo's date under the flimsiest possible excuse, the whole way this thing is a flimsy excuse,

and the quinceañeras of his childhood may have been cheap, but they meant just as much, they meant more, and he remembers the way his mother would kick off her heels and drag his dad to the dancefloor, make him, a truly, authentically terrible dancer, look smooth and capable only when he danced with her.

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Nacho drinks, and drinks, turning Lalo's unhappy face around in his mind like the poker chip he likes to play with, examines all his angles. Every half of a centimeter's difference in Lalo's eyes and mouth mean something, and Lalo only shows what he wants to show, and he showed Nacho displeasure.

Chapter 7: Five Months Ago Part Four

His back and his ass are sore and wet in ways that must be addressed in a shower, but even before then, Nacho feels scrubbed clean. Fuck me back into my place. Fuck me back into myself.

That is what Nacho wanted to say to Lalo then, over his car on the dirt track, and when this occurs to him later, it cuts him so thoroughly he has no choice but to force it to scar.

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Nacho regrets bumping up Domingo. This life will eat him alive when Nacho leaves. But Nacho regrets almost everything.

Chapter 8: Four Months Ago

He doubts their logic for a second—Lalo might go on the warpath when he discovers they've broken his favorite toy—but his resignation sweeps that away.

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Nacho knows Lalo sits across from him an unsympathetic murderer, a serial arsonist, an over-privileged man-child with no sense of consequences, but Lalo also sits across from him a man of taste and culture, a charismatic charmer, a passionate lover.

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Even if that had been possible, to never think of Lalo again, to never have to think about never having to think about Lalo again because, really, that meant he was thinking of Lalo, Nacho knows it would have left a hole more severe than any bullet wound he'd ever suffered to his body.

Once you accept Lalo in, Lalo leaves his shape, and even if Nacho had succeeded at hollowing that shape, at scraping all the nooks and crannies free of Lalo Salamanca, he knows the hole never would have scarred over. He would have lived with it like one lives with any other grief. An irreparable loss of a thing you cannot recover.

Without Lalo, without all that he represents and embodies, Nacho walks purposeless and suspended. A man between worlds.

Relief, seeing Lalo alive.

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The last thing he needs are those two ghosts hanging around him, poking him with the same questions he's been trying not to ask himself, what's so different now, babe, what's so different now, Nacho, what's so different now, Nachito, what's so different now, Ignacio, what's so different now, cariño, tesorito, bonito, mi—amor alma vida ciel sol y luna?

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This is not the life Nacho wants to lead anymore.

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Except, as usual, Nacho feels all the wrong things at the wrong times, and the stillness and calm only make him more uncomfortable.

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Lalo never says he misses Nacho. He never has to say it. Nacho can hear it, can feel it, and it makes every call excruciating. Without Lalo there, Nacho cannot lose himself in his lies. Lalo talks nonstop in his ear and Nacho wants to run and he cannot. Like this, still in, he cannot avoid Lalo even with Lalo in jail.

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No light here; Lalo touches right under Ignacio's chin, tilts him up. Those big, big eyes of Ignacio's, a lighthouse, Lalo the ship. "Don't make me remember you like this, Ignacio."

Ignacio turns his head away. The fog over his eyes worries Lalo.