Work Text:
Smooth Operators are working hard to move a nasty gash bleeding over Paco’s stomach when Dragona sees it, looking up to his face, twisted in a grimace not well concealed.
“Holy shit,” she says around a grin. “You have freckles!”
For a moment Paco seems to forget the pain he's in. His face goes all red and funny—Dragona has seen him flustered before, the few rare times she caught him stealing when even Paco had enough common sense to know that they'd only get in more trouble for it, and seemed to almost expect her to push him back in line. Not that it ever stopped him. It's a problem, but then again, they wouldn't be here if they didn't all have their fair share of problems.
Now this though, this is a different kind of flustered. For maybe the first time ever, Dragona finds herself glad to be looking at Paco’s stupid face. He's biting his lips together and looking away, and the soft spattering of dots at the edges of the tattoos across his cheeks is just barely visible. A few of them are too far to have been caught by the ink, unless he decided to paint the whole of his cheeks pitch black. Apparently Dragona’s just never gotten close enough to his face before to notice.
She puts her finger on two freckles just below his eye, over the thin strip of bare skin before the tattoo starts.
Paco flinches and yells. The move disrupts her Operators, and she hears one of them let out a tinny sound not unlike a yelp. Holy shit, she thinks, this is great. She's not sure why. It's not like it's much to her, what her gangmates do with their bodies, as long as they're alive and kicking, but the knowledge of Paco’s freckle-dotted face feels large in her hands, as does the harsh ink over it.
The skin right underneath the eye is horribly soft; it would have been very painful to tattoo. Even Paco, with his hardening skin and pliable muscles seems to have his limits.
Paco yells, his voice unusually strained. “Get off!”
“They're not done,” Dragona mumbles, but she backs off a bit and goes back to checking in to where her kids are hard at work.
It's not a small wound, and they're pretty lucky the two of them had been sent together on this job. Briefly, the thought of finding Paco bled out at the side of the road flashes through her mind, and a chill pang stabs inside her belly. Dragona shakes herself. It isn't likely; Paco is tougher than that, she is faster than that, and there are always ways and this would be too dumb of a way to go, the job not lucrative enough to warrant dying over. Paco wouldn't go that way. Except that's exactly how kids like him wind up, every day. Right now they're crouched in a dirty alleyway, Paco leaning against a trash container for organic waste, and he wouldn't be the first peer Dragona has walked past in a similar state in her life. If she didn't know him, she'd write him off as another hooligan drunk out of his mind, not worth the trouble he is sure to bring along. But she does know him.
It's weird, how a person's body reshapes before your eyes with familiarity. Her mom finds Paco threatening, calls him bad news like one would a rabid dog slinking closer and closer to your doorstep. Dragona, who has up to this point already lived a life and done her fair share of work for Meryl Mei, can't afford to be so threatened by a guy her age, but sometimes she can see where her mom is coming from.
Here, up close, Paco doesn't seem that scary, his edges mellowed out. His stomach rises with his breaths, rabbit-fast; Dragona feels them through the Operators working, that and the soft hairs going from his bellybutton down to past the edge of his jeans. The skin around the wound is warm to the touch, feverish, and trembling. He is all mass and muscle but when she looks at him so folded in on himself, she finds it hard to keep enough distance to understand what her mother means. Dragona has seen hurt dogs of skin and bone, baring sharp teeth and tense muscle, terrified out of their minds, and she sees her own face in the mirror every day.
She wants to ask about the tattoos even though she knows the answer already. She'd known of Paco before she knew him personally. People talk—kids, especially, who grow cruel with a target in mind, and Paco, a fat kid who came to school with bruises and cuts all over, was almost too easy of a pick. She wonders if he'd heard of her in a similar way, before Meryl Mei put them in front of one another and ordered them to cooperate.
Only a month before that Jodio had come to her during a school break, eyes wandering—his version of pointing fingers—to tell her that Paco Laburantes is back to school and he's ripped now, did you hear? Because Jodio is a sneaky gossip even when it's not his job to be so. Dragona had wanted to tell him off for it this time, feeling sleazy with the memory of hearing talks of her own body on the hallways, streets and buses, but she stopped. She hated how it made her sound, small and scared.
A ridiculous, unimportant thing to remember, but the memory is clear in her mind the way only those of people she'd come to know well afterwards sometimes are. Back then Jodio had sounded impressed, and Paco seemed all rough muscle and huge, sticky hands. The latter is still true, except now Jodio thinks Paco is an idiot and Dragona has pressed food and money into those hands and taken from them likewise, and most of that sculpted muscle has given way to round fat again.
Smooth Operators run the wound away from the two of them onto the trash container, and Dragona hears it break and leak apple peels and days old beans. It stinks. She prefers it to the smell of blood, which still fills her nostrils as she puts her hand over Paco’s stomach to make sure he's in one piece. Her fingers touch down just in time to move with his sigh of relief, then to feel his whole body jump. The shifting muscle beneath her palm seems to run from her in panic.
Paco swears at her, and when she looks up he does meet her eyes, and Dragona wishes he wouldn't.
“Sorry,” she says, panic surging through her for a hot flash. “Sorry.”
She's felt unknown, wandering hands over her body enough times to know the shame and horror of it. For all her dislike of Paco’s slippery ass, she doesn't want him hurt, and at the end of the day through all their spats he's never been awful to her for her body. A low, embarrassing bar to clear or even think of, but Dragona has known more people in her life who have spoken to her kindly and touched her with resentment than the other way around.
She would never do that. With an unusual desperation Dragona suddenly wants him to know that she would never do that, except she can't think of a way to say it, and there's a point when any touch is hurtful regardless of the intention. If she were the one sitting slumped against a trash container, as of recently not bleeding out, she wouldn't want to be touched or helped up, so she doesn't offer Paco a hand.
There's a tense silence between them on the way back that Dragona never thought she'd experience around Paco of all people, with neither of them awkward people by nature, and her having learned how to talk her way through a pinch from a young age. They've been mean and cruel to each other throughout all of their shared career, enough that it felt like there was nothing they could do to one another that would hurt for real, not in a way that lingers. Shows what she knows.
Whenever Jodio was there to see his older sister be poked and pulled around, Dragona was the most thankful for his silence afterwards. She didn't mind if he covered them in burns or left them sobbing on the ground; what meant the world was that he knew she didn't want to hear a sorry from anyone's mouth. What she's finding here is that she's not nearly as good of a comrade as Jodio.
When she catches up to Paco’s car parked behind a Burger King, she can't keep her mouth shut. She climbs into the passenger seat and puts her peace offering of two Sprites and a large bag of fries for them to share on the dashboard. It's a shit prize, but so is the paycheck they'll be getting for this fumbled job.
“Sorry I was weird,” she says, sort of annoyed that she was ever compelled to feel guilty about Paco in the first place. She's all done with it, ready to be familiar and sick of his bullshit antics and posturing again.
His eyes fall to the fries, and he can't quite keep the twist of shock from his face. He grabs the Sprite and starts the car, slurping at it loudly. “What?”
Which is fine. If Paco wants to act dumb, she can pretend she never noticed a flinch. It's the kindest act she knows of to give.