Disclaimer: Based on the movie Desperado by Robert Rodriguez. In no way official, just written for fun and for a friendly online challenge.

Notes: Written for Yuletide 2007. The request was for more about the relationship between Buscemi and the mariachi, possibly with slash. Yay.

Warnings: Canonical character death. Slashiness, violence and foul language.

YOUR ONLY FRIEND

Look at the man dying on the dusty sidewalk, under the burning sun.

1994, last year, he wasn't doing much of anything. He'd never been much of a doer, which according to his ex-wives was one of the main reasons they'd become ex. He'd got through school with low to average grades and gone straight to work at the garage.

He got Holly to marry him by pretending to have ambitions to open up his own mechanic shop, but the fact was he liked being an assistant. Nobody cared if he was late for work or took an extra five minutes on a cigarette break. By the time she figured that out they had a kid.

If there was one thing he regretted it was what a shit father he'd been.

Not that he had ambitions of being better. It was hard to change, even for someone he loved as much as Sam. It was even harder doing right by Sam since Holly took up with Kevin the garage manager. Kevin. Fuck it, he was Gobson at the garage, or boss, but Holly'd called him Kevin since before the breakup. He figured he should've known.

He wrote Sam letters. If he ever found out Holly was throwing them away, he'd decided, he'd fucking drive over there and take Sam, if it was the only thing he ever did with his life. They'd drive off and keep driving, gringo and little gringo, to places where no-one would come looking.

After the divorce, he went hunting for work in San Antonio. He told a few tales at a couple of garages, and worked for about a month until they found out how crap he was with mechanics. Next up was bartending. At least he knew how to pull a tap.

Wife number 2 was Alaskan beauty queen Christine. That only lasted about a month. She'd been very drunk that night.

Late 1993, the Guerrilla bar closed, and he camped out in his studio without electricity until the landlord bothered to kick him out. After that he just wandered around, going south as the nights got colder. There was always something to eat, and someone to buy him a drink, for a story or a bit of good time, if they were so inclined. He was good with words and not too particular. He did nothing but drink when he could, didn't even try to get another job. There was a black space where his soul should be, and sometimes he'd wake up terrified, covered in cold sweat, mind full of rats and bones and ash. It didn't help that sometimes those were around while he was awake, too.

South and south.

He passed by a river with some college kids skinny-dipping in the shallow water, shrieking and splashing. The guy looked something like his size, so he picked up his clothes and kept walking. When he got far enough he dipped in himself, splashing the surprisingly icy water over himself till he was almost clean. He dumped his old clothes in the next dustbin. He was clean and well-dressed, and he'd found a fifty dollar bill in the kid's pocket. He'd use it to buy a bit of heaven. He walked on.

He was in Mexico now, though the town's name escaped him. It had a bar, which was enough. There were tourists giggling in the corner, and an aged flower for a bartender, and Coca-Cola plates and luchadore posters on the wall. He ordered a beer, warm but rich, and sat back as the road began to fall off him. He felt like a new man. It would be summer soon, and anything could happen.

-

'The first time I saw you I thought you had a great ass.'

'Thank you,' said the mariachi, quick and soft, quizzical.

'I mean it, the finest ass I ever saw. And I'm not an ass man, you know. Or I wasn't. But don't think that's why I hooked up with you, or anything.'

'Why, then?'

'I wasn't doing anything else.'

-

'...So there she is, biggest chica I ever saw, and I fucked Miss Alaska, you know. She's trying to squeeze herself into this tiny seat, and I can already tell that ain't gonna work. And she's getting all embarrassed, my heart goes out to her, and I say look, give it up, take mine. You know what she did? Bitch maced me. Right in the eye. I'm talking burning, searing pain. And that's fucking New York, man. Don't even think about it.'

'I think they just like to boast about how tough they are,' said the bartender, her rich latin voice brimming with amusement.

'You're not even listening.'

The mariachi was sitting in the corner, drinking one glass of soda very slowly. Sometimes he'd pet his guitar case with his fingertips, feeling the texture of the case, the slight ache in his wrist, the puckering of skin on the back of his hand. He was listening.

'What about you?' said the man at the bar, in his fresh clothes and the five-day stubble, and the mariachi looked up, shaded eyes meeting watery ones. 'You a travelling man?'

-

'How could you see my ass if I was sitting down?'

'Man, you overthink everything, don't you? Hey, are you going to finish that?'

'Here.'

'Okay, so the first thing I thought was that you were looking pretty damn tough for a man drinking Fanta. And then I thought I'd kind of like it if you stood up and turned around, okay, and bent a little, because I could tell those trousers would just snap tight...

'You're embarrassed. Aww.'

-

There was gunfire, that night. It always starts and ends with blood, with the mariachi. Without it, he might have passed on unnoticed, and the American would have gone on with his pockets empty again, wandered towards some other life.

It started when he had just begun telling the mariachi about Sam, god knew why, he'd told a hundred strangers about Holly and Kevin and Christine, but not about Sam. There was something about the mariachi, a silence that made him speak the name of his son over his beer, and to think the mariachi would understand. The man wasn't saying much, but he was watching him with something like compassion. He liked to think it was compassion, anyway.

The men, bad guys, came through the front door with a crack and a bang, boots scraping the floor, like villains in an old western movie, the door banging on it's hinges, almost knocking down the dartboard. They were men with guns and no badges, with the whiff of money and violence on their breath. They took a table near the corner, one of them pulled out a pack of cards, and suddenly the mariachi wasn't listening to him anymore. He was looking at him, though.

'You don't know them,' said the mariachi, surprised. It was not a question.

'I count that among my blessings,' he said, puzzled.

The mariachi was quiet for a while. Then, 'Go, now,' he said, and something in the his eye made the gringo obey. He scrambled out of his chair and out of the little place, and he planned to keep on walking and fast till he hit someplace safe, as far from here as possible. He had no intention of getting in trouble.

He walked until he was almost at the edge of the little down, and then slowed down. He stopped. He turned around. Slowly, he began to walk back. Step by step.

When he was close enough to hear the shots it was already almost over. He ducked in an alley, and when the mariachi came out running, bloodied and beautiful against the flames, he pulled him to it and they ran together, ran and ran until they reached a river, and the fresh nice stolen shirt became strips of bandages.

He didn't know exactly why he did it, but he never regretted it, not even in that last moment when there was that strange pair of thuds and the sharp pain in his chest.

-

The story came out a little by little, and though the mariachi no longer played, our dying man thought he could hear the story sung in whispering Spanish lyrics, spilling into the night under guitar strings, this very Mexican tale of love and death, grief and revenge. Gringos don't feel the world that way. Gringos have country music, instead, and the slow death of the soul. He lay by the fire in the wilderness, listened to the mariachi's low voice in the night, and something in him began to fight it.

'You have learned to shut up,' said the mariachi one evening when his companion was lying back in their little camp on the way to the next town, watching smoke curl against the stars.

It wasn't exactly like falling in love. It was better. This was nothing as mundane as a relationship, like he had with Holly and Holly had with Kevin. There was no fucking comparison. He'd die for the mariachi as sure as he'd die for Sam, and he was a fucking coward. What do you call that?

He offered up his pack with his last cigarette silently. The mariachi's big scarred hand closed over his, and pushed it back. The plastic crinkled, reflecting the firelight. The night was full of chittering, rustling, crackling, under a layer of deceptive peace.

'So what's the plan, once we hit Saragosa?'

Blood. It was always blood.

-

The night before the Oro Verde massacre, they stayed in a little hotel at the edge of town. They shared a ratty room, like so many ratty rooms before that, and slept on the less lumpy of the two beds, their foreheads together, a hand cupping the mariachi's ear, fingertips brushing his hair.

The mariachi woke first, and spent a long time looking at the lines and shadows around the closed eyes before his, breathing in his breath of onions and Chango.

He couldn't think of the time after it was over. It seemed like it couldn't exist. He could picture only one thing, beyond that last bullet, and it was this man, growing older, tougher, warmer. It was a good thought, at least.

-

The mariachi never told Carolina the whole story. Even in love, some things are private.