I want to tell you this story without having to be in it.
-Part 4-
-Part 4-
For a short moment, Nacho envies them. It must be nice to be too high to feel any shame, to be drugged out of his mind enough to let Lalo take what he wants and to not care at all.
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He was so stupid to think he was ever in control.
Lalo squeezes past him to retrieve something from the fridge, and his hand skates across Nacho's waist, easy and proprietary. Nacho hates him.
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He had wanted to be seen, to be acknowledged—not by anyone, but by Lalo. But maybe that's nothing new either.
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Nacho turns to face him, scrutinising, and he's so handsome and awful it makes him want to hit something, makes him want to weep. He's so sick of his own skin. He wants so badly to crawl out of it.
The bracelet was a gift from his father; it didn’t have any meaning beyond the comfort and the sense of calm it brought him. Nacho told Lalo he got it from the corpse of a man he choked to death who wouldn’t just shut up during sex. Lalo laughed, took his words for it as he always did and called him mi paraíso lindo as he plowed him.
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And then softly, as if to himself, “Lalo would've gotten to live another day, too.”
“You cared about him?”
Nacho thinks he has never heard Mike sound so startled before, and the thought brings a bitter, painful smirk to his lips. Fuck, he’s still bleeding.
“You cared about him?”
Nacho thinks he has never heard Mike sound so startled before, and the thought brings a bitter, painful smirk to his lips. Fuck, he’s still bleeding.
-
“And what about you? Did you feel the same about him?” Mike asks softly, as if the answer would make any damn difference now. As if Nacho hadn’t thought about the same damn question for many sleepless nights, with Lalo’s bare chest pressed against his back and his hand resting protectively over his frantic heart.
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But more than anything, he remembers Lalo telling him, “I see you, I do.” No one had ever seen Nacho the way he had allowed Lalo to. The rest of the world had seen his deception, his desperation, his ambition, his failures and his regrets.
But Lalo…Lalo saw the very core of his being, stripped bare of all the mismatched parts that he had nailed to himself over the years. And Lalo had loved it. Lalo had loved him.
The silence that has followed Mike’s soft query, coupled with the sting of unshed tears Nacho feels in his eyes, speaks volumes about the things he cannot say.
“I'm sorry.”
The apology sounds sincere enough, but Nacho has no use for it. Too little, too late; much like Lalo's apparent love for him.
“I'm sorry.”
The apology sounds sincere enough, but Nacho has no use for it. Too little, too late; much like Lalo's apparent love for him.
-
Nacho takes a shuddering breath, biting into his scabbed lip to quench the urge to cry. He refuses to show up at Fring’s orchestrated death party with red, puffy eyes.
He will scoop these memories from his mind like handfuls of dirt and throw them on top of Lalo's coffin.
Nacho is unable to produce an answer. He wants to shout out that it’s because Lalo has nobody to trust—that he’s nothing more than a plaything for the man’s sick sense of entertainment.
That he’s been carted here under the guise of mentoring; to make Lalo feel like he isn’t some lonely asshole from a shit-for-brains, drug-peddling family, desolate and alone in this arid wasteland of Mexico.
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There is no excuse to be made for what Nacho has done. There’s no endgame, no way that he can possibly spin this in order to justify his actions. It’s all just a mess of bad choices.
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Nacho doesn’t want to beg. He feels as if he’ll lose the last remaining strands of his dignity if he does so, already hating himself for how much he wants this—how much he wants Lalo to make him forget everything, just this once.
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An inkling of shame crawls across Nacho’s skin. His cheeks burn at the resurgence of certain memories, more visceral than they would be if he were looking at photographs of them in hand.
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Nacho thinks that the crush of Lalo’s lips might be the only thing that can wipe his mind completely clear.
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His skin burns along the trails of Lalo’s fingers. It’s the only connection of skin between them, a line being drawn in what terms they’ve conceded themselves to.
Nacho doesn’t get his hopes up enough to feel actually disappointed when he’s back at the Ocotillo motel. He’s always been good at protecting himself from disappointment, primarily through a lack of hope.
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“I’ve never met anyone who enjoys being miserable as much as you.”
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“Because I think,” Lalo says, “it’s psychotic to keep us both trapped here day after day and then pretend like you can’t stand spending any more time with me. I’m not doing this to you—you’re doing this to yourself.”
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“This is what I’m fucking talking about, Ignacio,” Lalo says, taking the insult in stride. “You want to pretend that’s all on me? Go ahead, but we both know it’s a lie. I don’t have a lot of respect for people who can’t admit what they want.”
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In some alternate universe where Lalo isn’t the weirdest person Nacho has ever met—and isn’t a Salamanca—maybe there could’ve been something here. But then again, in that universe, he’s not really Lalo. It’s a pointless thought experiment, and he tries not to dwell on it, but closing that door just opens a hundred others.
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It’s enough to torture himself for an hour or so—and as he thinks through the chain of cause-and-effect of his life, he can’t help but notice how many major milestones are choices that other people made. (Do you actually want anything or do you just react to things?)
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Their paths crossed at the worst possible time; things might have been different if Lalo had come north to manage the Salamanca’s territory instead of Hector, if Fring never got involved, cinching a noose around Nacho’s neck. But there he goes again, pondering impossibilities, things that will never be.
There's no going back from here, and that's exactly what Lalo wants.
-
"Really?" Nacho asks dryly, and Lalo taps his cheek in a jokingly chiding way. Lalo kisses him then, more to it, insinuating, and Nacho tries to grip into reality, into himself, to understand what he's doing here.
Don't fall.
Whatever you do, don't fall.
Don't fall.
Whatever you do, don't fall.