onlythebranch | (no subject)

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The worse Mad Sweeney's luck gets, the more he thinks about Laura fucking Moon.

It's fucked up, he's very aware of it, because when he thinks about her, he's not just thinking about how badly he wants his bloody coin back. He's thinking of that moment after the second accident, when he'd stood on that highway with his blessed coin between his fingers and just stared at her and known. He's thinking about that creeping insistence inside him that he do the right thing, whatever the fuck that means, and he's thinking about how angry he'd been, how badly he'd wanted to turn and walk away and leave her rotting there on the asphalt.

He's thinking of how gently he'd placed the coin back on her chest, how her dead, skinned muscles had felt under his fingertips.

She didn't deserve the gift he'd given her, but then, he knows he had never deserved it either.

These days he's drinking more than he usually does, which is saying something. Chances are nobody really notices, he's drunk more often than not even when times are good. It's just that drinking makes the rest of it sort of blend into the background and he can forget all this shit he keeps thinking about. It starts with the coin, but it ends up at Laura, and over and over he finds himself wandering back to the idea that it's not the coin he wants to see again, but her.

And that idea can go fuck itself.

He drinks straight from the bottle, Southern Comfort minus the fucking coke, drinks enough that he's stumbling when he moves from the kitchen to the living room. There's a moment's consideration when he thinks he ought to call someone, but then he just collapses on the couch with the bottle resting against his thigh and he turns on the TV. What he gets is some reality show about body painting, which is fine, which is good enough for him. It's brainless and he doesn't have to think, he can just get lost in the alcohol and the colours and when he finds himself drifting off, he thinks he's never been so thankful for a little bit of sleep.

The last thought he has before he slips into a dreamless black is that he wishes he could see her.

It's late when he wakes again. The TV is still on, but it's a different show now, some late night bullshit that never quite makes any sense and it's made worse by the fact that he's still drunk. The lights are off, the room is dark, but all at once he's aware of some change. There's pressure against his thigh other than the bottle of whiskey, something cool and slightly damp.

The air smells like blood.

Carefully, he sits up and sets the bottle aside, then reaches for the lamp he knows is beside the couch. The room floods with warm, yellow light and he looks down into the pretty, dead eyes of Laura Moon.

She's wearing the same clothes she was the night of the accident. The one that killed her. The one he caused. She's lying on the couch beside him, her head propped up against his thigh at a perfect angle that he's staring down into her face. There's blood on her lips, dripping gently onto his jeans, leaving a dark red smear he can feel against his skin.

This isn't Laura with his coin. This is Laura quivering in her death throes on the side of a highway. This is Laura after deciding to suck Robbie's cock one last time, after Sweeney had swerved his truck into their lane on Wednesday's instructions. This is Laura before the coin, the Laura who should have been left to rot in her grave, but instead she's here. On his fucking couch.

He can't stop looking at her. He takes his phone out of his pocket and dials the first person he thinks might be able to help. It's late, he's not sure they'll answer, but when they do -- or maybe it's their voicemail, he's too drunk and too fucked up to think about it -- he just says, "I'm at home. I need help."

Then he hangs up again. Hangs up and stares at Laura staring back at him.

"Fuck," he whispers.

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"No, you'd be fuckin' dead, so you wouldn't know better one way or the other," Sweeney bites out. People put so much emphasis on the sack of meat they leave behind, but he's spoken to Anubis enough to know how this shit works. Across religion, across borders, at the end of it, no one gives a fuck about what's behind, they only look ahead.

For the first time in their lives, as soon as it's over, they finally learn not to dwell on the past.

"You think marking it is gonna mean no one digs her up?" he asks. "Seems like advertising t'me."

And he doubts anyone is going to come digging around out here. But he's willing to take the risk rather than mark it and let people know she's here.

"I think marking it means that you can make sure no one else is going to do anything," he says, leveraging his foot into the shovel to get a little more up, half wondering how many graves he's dug in his life at this point and if that's why it feels so comfortable.

Should he be worried about that? He doesn't plan to be.

"Do you die?" he asks, leaning on the shovel when he needs a break (and a drink, fishing out his flask). "Can you?"

"You got some weird fuckin' logic where making it obvious there's something buried here is gonna prevent anyone from fucking around with it," he answers. Vasquez can say whatever the fuck he wants on the subject, Mad Sweeney isn't putting a marker up where they bury Laura. He's just not.

"Dunno," he answers and he keeps digging. "Probably not. Not by usual means anyhow. Someone shoots me in the head, I'll probably die, but used to be my luck made it so no one could shoot me in the head. Or shoot me anywhere. They aimed at me and pulled the trigger and the gun would jam. Or worse. A lot of people lost their fingers trying to shoot me."

Vasquez believes in some ritual and marking a grave is important. It shows where they are, it means you can come and observe, respect. If Sweeney doesn't want it, though, he shrugs and keeps drinking, eyes on him as he talks about dying.

He figures he's earned some alcohol, so he passes it over. "This is because of your luck, yes? So, tell me this," he says, getting back to digging once he's set the flask beside Sweeney so he can drink. As he gets dirt up, he's speaking, to make the time pass, "do you take luck? Is it good luck for you because it's shit luck for them?"

"No," Sweeney answers with a sharp look. If he wasn't in such a bad mood already, maybe he wouldn't have taken offense, but it pisses him off. "I am fuckin' luck, asshole. I've given it to you. You've benefited it from, did it seem like shit luck to you then? But luck is a fickle fuckin' thing. It's like the bloody wind, it blows both ways."

He sees the flask, has his own in his jacket, but he's still drunk from earlier. The alcohol is sloshing around sourly in his stomach and he thinks if he drinks anymore, he'll be sick right in this fucking hole.

Vasquez doesn't take offense, mainly because for him, if someone's not calling him names, it's stranger. "It just seems like there's something connected if someone is trying to shoot you. You get away without getting shot, but they get fucked over," he points out.

"I like my luck, tramposo, it's very good luck," he assures him, not trying to soothe him so much as to state the obvious. It's why he keeps leaving out offerings, after all. "I had shit luck for years, I figured I was due, but never thought it would come from someone."

With one last hefty heave of dirt, he nods to the hole they've dug. It's about four feet deep. "Want to keep going? Or is this enough for you?"

"That's not me taking shit from them," he answers. "That's just them being dumb enough to try and tangle with me in the first place. It's like if a skilled swordsman goes up against the best fuckin' swordsman the world has to offer. Doesn't matter how good he might be, he'll lose to the best. Doesn't make him less good, just makes him stupid for havin' done it in the first place."

It's a shit analogy maybe. He doesn't know. Doesn't really care.

"It's enough, I guess," he says a second later, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "Is what it fuckin' is."

Vasquez settles his shovel into the ground above them and hauls himself up enough to sit with his legs spread, reaching for his cigarette so that he can light it up and smoke, not sure if Sweeney wants his help to put the body inside or if he wants privacy. This Laura thing always seemed very complicated to him, so he's not sure what's actually wanted.

"It's like Billy, with knives," he supplies. "Luckiest man I ever know, because he's so fucking good at it." If Faraday's story had been true, then Vasquez definitely missed out on watching Billy kill a man with a knife in a gunfight. "You want help?" he asks, around his cigarette. "Or is this something you have to do?"

Vasquez talks a lot. Most of the time it's just noise, something Sweeney is used to, because he tends to talk a hell of a lot, too, in the right circumstances, but right now he goes back and forth between feeling deeply irritated and quietly grateful. There are moments when he wishes Vasquez would just shut the fuck up and let him dig in peace and other moments when he's glad for the distraction.

At the question, he can only shrug, then he goes to get Laura without answering. He doesn't want help. He doesn't need help. He needs to just do this and he can't really talk about it. So he picks her up and then brings her to the hole, lowering her carefully into the ground.

There's nothing to say. He just begins to shove the dirt back in on top of her.

It's only when Sweeney starts to shovel the dirt that Vasquez moves, still smoking as he levers one boot into the dirt, hauling himself up to the top so he can start. The silence is starting to unnerve him, which means that he wants to say something. "I can say something," he says, but it's not just to fill the silence.

"Prayers, something," he says, given that even for himself, he still believes in a higher power. Now, even more, he thinks. After all, he's seen evidence that strange things exist. "Everyone deserves some kind of blessing."

"Don't," he says. The hole is nearly filled and Sweeney steps back, spreading the last bit around so it doesn't look so much like a freshly dug grave. They're pretty far out in the dark, he doubts anyone is going to stumble across her, but he does his best to disguise it as best he can.

As best as he has the patience for right now.

"Just... don't. She's not the one for it." And he thinks to start spouting that sort of shit right now, for this woman, it'd be offensive. That's not her life. Not the shit she believed.

Vasquez has old habits that die hard, but he stamps on them so he doesn't perform the sign of the cross, doesn't offer a prayer. He doesn't know this woman, but it seems strange not to offer a prayer for a woman. In his history, men are shitty and evil. The women and children might not be perfect, but they usually don't deserve it.

"Then what about for you?" Vasquez isn't an idiot. Sweeney isn't taking this so casually, so he thinks maybe it's not prayers, but, something else. "Would it do anything for you if I went home and made an offering? Does it soothe or help?"

"Don't do that either, lad," he says. "With my luck the way it is, the more you try to make the offerings work, the more danger you'll be in."

And that's probably as close as he'll get to admitting he doesn't want something bad happening to Vasquez. It's a different sort of affection than what he'd felt for Laura, of course, he wouldn't even think to compare this, but he knows, in his own way, Vasquez matters.

Which means he should probably stay the fuck away.

"I'm not going to stop them," Vasquez says, which isn't to be stubborn, but because he remembers what Sweeney had once said when they'd been drinking. That it's worse if he starts and then he stops. Besides, he never really expected a cushy and easy life, so he can face if something goes wrong.

Plenty already has, in his life, it's almost stranger here to live without that. "Why is it getting so bad?" he asks, tucking his flask back into his jacket so he can focus on the cigarette and grabbing the shovel from Sweeney to carry them both.

“No coin. No luck. Probably just going to get worse from here on until somethin’ kills me,” Mad Sweeney answers honestly. He looks at the overturned dirt once more, knowing he’ll be back here before too long, then turns away.

He’d thought he was ready for death. Turns out he’s wrong. This isn’t how he wants to go out. If it’s his time, he still owes a bloody war, he doesn’t want to go out lying face down in two inches of water just because his luck has gone all to shit.

Vasquez gives Sweeney a disturbed look, something twisting in his stomach. He's seen death plenty, but that doesn't mean he's used to it and he likes Sweeney. The last thing he wants is to have to see someone else he cares about dead, but this isn't some asshole he can shoot to death six times (and oh, if he could relive anything, it would be shooting McCann over and over again in revenge), this is just bad luck.

"So we need your coin," is what Vasquez is hearing. "Things show up here, yes? Like my posters? Maybe your coin, it will come? Or something else lucky. What about that?"

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