nadia costa (treta) wrote in remains_rpg, @ 2015-11-14 23:18:00 |
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The plans had been in motion for a while, but then finding her brother again had thrown them askew: there was the temptation to set her entire life on hold, orbiting him endlessly like a small and lonely planet. An astronomical object careening back from the outer reaches. Selfishly, indulgently, Alejo liked having her orbiting him. For the first time, he wasn’t chasing people or begging them to stay in his life. He could reach out and feel them. But though they were getting to know each other (finally, finally), there was nothing she could really do from his bedside; other than smile like their mother and wrinkle her nose the way she had when she was young and Alejo had brought her home an orange he’d lifted from a shop. Just for her. Yet Alejo and Olivia were on the slow mend, and Nadia was plagued by the awareness that she could be more useful elsewhere. And since Olivia wasn’t able to go on the expedition anymore, Nadia was damn well going to ensure one of them did. Because there had to be something better, something out there not torn apart by raider turf wars and Los Nahuales. She’d be out for a few days, five at maximum—they hadn’t packed supplies for much longer—and then return with equipment in hand, ready to build the greenhouse with Erik & co. Something to feed and provide. That was what Nadia kept telling herself, at least. She’d been haunting the hospital a lot recently, so it wasn’t a surprise when she creaked open the door to the room that had become a part of herself. Nadia craned her head in with a cautious smile (Alejo wasn’t pleased about her leaving, she’d already gathered that much). The bruises on her face had mostly healed, leaving a sickly yellowing on the skin. “Buenas tardes,” she said carefully, dropping her backpack in the corner, her free hand sketching the corresponding ASL he’d taught her. He signed back simply- ‘hello’. The sun had set, which meant she was already long past LBJ’s curfew. “How are you feeling?” “Better and better,” Alejo said. His wounds had been made worse by his dash from the train car Torrie had left him in, to the hospital, his need to get out and find some help outweighing his need to survive. He had some internal issues, but they were doing alright, and he could walk a few shorter distances. His brain hadn’t swelled, and his nose was healing. He’d recover, maybe even thrive now that Emmanuel wasn’t apart of his life anymore. Sure, part of him was worried about one of those goons finding him and putting him out, but another part of him was pretty sure they had him pegged for dead. “Come, sit,” he asked, and she obediently pulled up a chair and moved to his side, close enough to reach his hands in that bed. He knew that she had things to do, things outside of hanging out with her big brother. But he’d never slept so well as the nights when she fell asleep in the hospital bed next to him, he had never felt so at peace as when he could see her chest rise and fall and eyes blink or twitch- proof of life. Proof of existence. “When do you go?” he asked, absentmindedly using ASL along with the English. His two hearing aids were in old yellow pill bottle, given to him just to keep them safe. “Very very early tomorrow morning. Before dawn, actually, so I will spend the night here with you.” Earlier, she might have tacked on a tentative If that’s okay?: dogged by some indefinable anxiety that perhaps they wouldn’t like each other after all, that this stranger from Brazil would get on his nerves, that twenty years apart had scored a too-deep rift between them with no shared memories for her to lean on… But none of that had come to pass. She couldn’t get enough of him; and he couldn’t get enough of her. She smelled like their mother, he’d always assumed the little flowers that grew in veins of green over their door had been the scent, but he knew now it was Costa femininity. And Nadia was growing used to assuming, to simply taking up residence by his side without question. “We’re leaving from the hospital, so it is rather convenient.” Her hands kept smoothing down the edge of Alejo’s thin hospital coverlet, her light tone belying her anxiety. Now that she was standing here at this crossroads, Nadia suddenly very much didn’t want to do it after all, didn’t want to leave this frail skinny figure behind. But then there was the thought of Los Nahuales. Hands gripping her jaw, hard enough to bruise. Spitting Spanish back in their faces. Olivia’s raw scream. Rodeo’s face painted in bloody lines, a knife jabbed into a throat. It had only been four days. Her thoughts kept drifting, creeping closer to those memories, then jerking away from them as if burned. Alejo’s first language was not Spanish, or Portuguese, or English, or even ASL- it was faces. A childhood without hearing aids had taught him to see every passing twitch and understand them. He’d learned that silence said more than a scream ever could. He reached out, and touched one of her hands, squeezing it in his own bigger one. She accepted the comfort gratefully, something silent passing between them, her grip tightening. “What can I bring you?” she asked. A temporary deflection. “More batteries?” “Yourself,” Alejo said at once, meaning it despite how much like a Hallmark card it stank. He thought for a moment, trying to think of something- anything. He couldn’t. “I want to draw you, before you go. I got some sheets of papers, and a clip board. There’s a ball point pen, it’s all over there,” he said. The light wasn’t too bad, and she was healing. And deeper than that, Alejo wanted to learn to draw the curves of her face, the way her eyes looked. He wanted to memorize every inch of detail and be able to draw her a thousand times over in a hundred different styles. Because if he could draw her without thinking about it, then he would never forget what she looked like again. Something clenched in her chest. The request gave her pause, but only for a heartbeat before Nadia slipped out of his grip and over to the table, where his few belongings sat spread out neatly. Just like she’d carefully lined up all of her sparse possessions on the shelves at the library. A small smile quirked her lips when she noticed. Maybe it was genetic, maybe it was growing up in a motel for Alejo and growing up with not having enough to birth clutter for Nadia. The woman came back cradling papers pinned to the clipboard, the blue ballpoint pen. It was a good request, and it wasn’t as if she could deny her brother anything anyway, nor wanted to. “On one condition. I cannot draw, so as long as you promise to let us take a selfie tonight,” she said, a playful edge in her voice. (That warmth had been coming back more and more around him, Nadia’s various pieces aligning and coming back together, a shattered jigsaw reforming. Despite all its troubles and dangers and pains, the last few months in Austin had still made her whole in a way she hadn’t been before.) He laughed, and nodded, signing ‘yes’ quickly and taking the art supplies from her. He hadn’t drawn the whole time he’d been with Los Nahuales, not more than a few sketches on napkins. But since the hospital, he’d done more, lots of sketches. Many featured Torrie, some Claire who was a more distant memory than Nadia now. Many, many of Marina. He’d drawn her a thousand times over in his life, and it was no different not. But none of Nadia- he needed her next to him to start that. “Sit,” he said again, helping her adjust the chair so the light didn’t throw him off. Nadia settled, a little restlessly at first (she was a woman of movement and energy), but then she managed to find a comfortable position. An equilibrium to let her sit patiently, like how she’d trained herself to become motionless and still while waiting for a horde to pass, a wild animal frozen. He started with light lines, just getting the basic shapes. He could draw faster if he wanted, he could draw so quickly that the caricature artists on piers a millions miles and years away would have scowled. But now Alejo took his time. “Your head looks better,” he said. “Slowly but surely,” she said vaguely. Being reminded of it made her cheek itch, and Nadia resisted the urge to reach up and scratch at the still-healing injury. She’d seen Olivia earlier in the afternoon, and it hadn’t been an easy meeting. Sourness piled between them, welling up in their guts, bitterness fouling the memory. “I am… glad you left them,” Nadia added haltingly, after a thoughtful pause. How to broach this? They’d discussed the jaguars but never fully, not yet. “From what you and Marina have said, I gather that they were not always… like this.” (Possessive hands on her face, a man’s hissing breath in her ear. Aarón’s drawling voice, now dead. A shiver ran down her spine.) Alejo stopped, his pen held and almost touching the paper still. He had moved his knees up to help support the clipboard. Not an ideal position, but he knew better than to try and get out of the bed just to draw. There was a hilarity to how much people cooed and wanted art and writing, but didn’t understand why the process took time, effort, or concentration. Art cost more than money to make. “No. They were always like this, they just did a better job at pretending to be human,” he said. He remembered Marina coming to his door, bruised after Emmanuel made her do a job for him. He’d run a bath for her, soothed her wounds, and fought the urge to kill Emmanuel himself. He’d had to fight that urge often through his life. “Some of them… some try to be better. They tend to die quickly, by order of their own group. I tried to be better,” he said, gesturing to his busted up body. Her gaze shifted up, enough to take him in some more. “Didn’t always succeed.” “Then I am happy that you left them and survived doing so.” Nadia sounded firmer now, and there was a stubborn jut to her chin (his pen traced the lines, was reminded yet again of their mother). “While I am gone… When you step outside to see Marina, promise me you will not go further?” Marina. If Alejo were a quilt, Nadia would make up every stitch that attached squares together, but Marina would make up the largest, softest squares. The well worn parts that needed replacing, but Alejo didn’t have the heart to. He missed her, he wanted her in his arms and he wanted to know she was safe. He had long since let go the hope of her loving him one day, accepted friendship with a happy heart. But he missed her deeply. “This city, it isn’t safe,” Nadia continued. “And they asked me about you. I don’t want you to risk running into them. Not until they can be got rid of first.” However in the world that could be accomplished. Her faith currently sat more with the Hellhounds than with the Capitol on that front—albeit for highly personal reasons, clouded and fueled by emotion. Alejo swallowed, he picked the picture back up and started drawing again, focusing first on her hairline. It was soft, wispy. “I promise. You and she are the only two people in this town I have left to care about,” Alejo said. He thought for a moment about others, Torrie and Anton. But they were not as important, not right then when his wounds were so fresh and his needs so great. “Have you gotten to talk with Marina very much?” he asked, a little curious. “Not as much as I would like.” That answer came more easily, quickly, without hesitation. Nadia still sat primly in that chair, head angled slightly downwards as she looked at her knees. There it was- Alejo knew what angle he wanted to change his drawing to. He started to work again. “But we’ve spent a good amount of time together. And we text each other when we can, since seeing each other in-person is harder these days. I can see why you love her; I have grown to, as well, like a sister.” Love. Like a sister. Alejo felt the same familiar words he’d used so often. And like Catarina might have been. He was one of the only people who knew of their infant sister. She didn’t even need to say it out loud. “I call her Irma,” Alejo said, the word for sister falling out of his mouth. “When I met her, she was 15 and in a bad situation. I tried to help her, she didn’t want it. But we are friends, and she is my sister in a very different way than you. You are the sister of my heart, she is the sister of my mind,” he said, struggling to find the right words. He had to sign a few, and then find the right word- sometimes English, sometimes Spanish. Words were difficult, they were little shards of glass that dug into Alejo. His sister often wrestled with them as well: her English clogging up behind her tongue, turning stilted and awkward and stiff, the woman frustrated and impatient when she couldn’t get out everything she needed to say all at once. And since his Portuguese had turned out to be atrophied. Spanish was the official bridge, the chain that connected them: she’d been falling back on it more and more often, a way to communicate at the rapidfire pace she wanted. The Costas’ sentences kept slipsliding back and forth between Spanish and English as context demanded, code-switching at the drop of a hat; it was hardly even worth tracking which language they were currently in, unthinking as it was. They were the melting pot of languages. He was getting a far more solid image now of her, the blue working together as eyelashes appeared. “I won’t ask because I know- she’s gone,” he said, talking about the woman who shared a nose and jaw with Nadia. “I could say the same about Juan.” Her sad little smile twisted, settled. “I had confirmation from Marina that you were still alive, or at least had been alive recently in San Antonio—but having not heard you mention him, I assume our father is gone also.” Alejo hadn’t seen her interview, she realised suddenly. She wasn’t sure she wanted to mention it: it was a too-intimate glimpse of that weary, careful, lonely animal who had come padding in from the jungle. But Alejo deserved to have whatever he could, in her temporary absence. It was an artefact. A video for him to pore over, see her talking and in motion. “There is…” she started, then adjusted. “A filmmaker from the Dog Park, one of my friends. Nathaniel. He interviewed me on the freenet, early on. You could go back through the archives and watch it.” That answer seemed almost easy to Alejo- don’t read the book, just wait for the movie. He wondered what had happened, how long and horrible had her death been? Then again, he was avoiding talking about their father. Yet she hadn’t even spoken of their mother’s death properly in the interview, not all the details. She’d skimmed over it. It was the usual story, nothing special or earth-shattering. Predictable, almost. But still special to them. “Mamãe turned in Guatemala. We had to shoot her.” It was like dropping a brick onto his stomach. Turned, shot, that was bad. It was normal, it was expected, but it still hurt to hear it and he stopped his work for a moment, closing his eyes. He knew the proper response was to say he was sorry, to say how much he wished he’d known her. Instead something else came out of his mouth, spurting out without him thinking. “I hated our father for not getting you and her here. I thought he was lazy, I thought he didn’t want you both here. I yelled at him. Often.” Nadia looked up at him then, meeting her brother’s eye. Questions were jockeying about for prominence in her mind. Did he? What was the delay? Why did it take so long? Instead, she settled for “I imagine it was not very easy to do, either legally or illegally.” The American dream, indeed. Their family splintered in two, torn apart across the continents. Alejo did not have an interview that he could offer Nadia. He had a graphic novel, but that was buried somewhere in comic book stores, a few Barnes and Nobles, and in his own studio. He couldn’t just show her. He’d have to communicate it to her, and it was difficult to decide what to pick from. Juan being forced to work for the cartel? His staying, despite having an out of some small kind? How little he’d supported Alejo’s art? His death? “He was apart of them. The cartel- he was a member. From the moment we first left for America until the day he died,” Alejo said, his hand not as steady as he wanted. It was as if the pen was trying to tell him to stop and look Nadia in the eye when he delivered news like that. He kept drawing, glancing over only to see what her brows were like. “He ran guns.” “Was that how you… got started?” He hated how her brows moved, they went down. She was disappointed, he was sure of it. “No. I didn’t join until after the zombies started. I hated them- I still hate them. Emmanuel, the man who leads him, he’s… he’s a Disney villain. All he thinks about his profit for himself. He hurt Marina, often, he made life hell. He hates me too, always has. First I was the kid who couldn’t hear, then I was a druggie who could cause trouble, and then the reformed drug addict that pointed out he was an ass.” Alejo still drew, shading now. Shading was relaxing, just filling in what he’d already put down. “I was a teacher, I taught art. I drew comic books, I had my own graphic novel. I had a life.” He swallowed, and realized he’d drawn too hard- her right side was going to look dark. Damn. “I joined to survive.” “In the long run, that is probably the best reason, if there had to be one.” What would she have done if she’d come here, found him, and her brother had turned out to be a monster? A musclebound thug, a leering lech at the ladies, tattooed and gruff and violent and horrible? Had he never lost his hearing, never lost his trust in Juan, he might have been. But Alejo is the opposite of all that: sensitive, kind, thoughtful. No wonder he didn’t fit in. Whereas their father ran guns— Nadia couldn’t even be surprised about it; all she knew of Juan had been faded photographs and scribbled letters, battered and crumpled in the mail until they stopped coming entirely. Sudden warmth, gratefulness, and love all welled up in her chest until she could barely control it. “But that road, as terrible as it was, did lead here in the end. Helped me get here. A good thing to come out of something ugly, no?” “A great thing,” Alejo agreed, finally putting the art down. Only the first half was even on the page, he had more to go, but right then he wanted to hold his sister’s hands and see her. See her with his own eyes, not just with the pen and a need to graph her face into doable, draw-able parts. “Nadia, I asked when you were going to come almost every day as a child. I was sure you must be only days or weeks. But then I thought about you having to go through what I went through to get here… I thought about you becoming like me. And I wanted you still, but I wanted you to come when you could come safely. That’s why I asked a friend to bring you, not just a stranger of the cartel.” He felt like he owed Nadia that explanation- after all, Alejo had been a successful writer and artist, a teacher- he’d had the money to get her over for a few years before he had taken the steps. But paying a stranger would have been like spitting into the air and hoping it didn’t hit his face on it’s way back down. “I’m sorry I dragged you through hell.” “You?” She scoffed a laugh now, disbelieving, as she moved her chair closer and clasped Alejo’s hands again (once again, he’d read her actions voicelessly; she’d been aching to break loose from that model-stillness). “You dragged me through hell? Alejo, you saved me from it. I probably would’ve been dead back in Rio if I’d stayed there. It’s a dense city—more than Bangkok, London, Tokyo, New York. I would have been devoured. Coming north rescued at least one of the Costas. That’s what it did.” Her voice is caught in her throat now, the Spanish flying. It’s the only way she can express herself about this, this nightmare that was two years in the making. For it was a nightmare. Hellish, awful. But at the end, she woke up. It was as if Nadia’s words lifted everything from Alejo’s shoulders. She was Hercules come to hold onto the Earth for a few moments while Atlas moved his shoulders and stood up straight. Her life had been a nightmare, and yet she didn’t hate him for it- hate him for being the sibling Juan took, hate him for not coming to get her himself. Hate him for any one of the thousand sins and reasons he could imagine she might have hated him for. He reached over and pulled her towards him, hugging her body tightly to his body. He couldn’t see her lips, couldn’t read her face then, but it didn’t matter. He needed the full physical contact badly, and if they were young he would have asked her to sleep in the bed with him that night so they could pretend they were back at the little apartment they’d both been born in, sharing clothes and blankets and iced treats that Juan had sometimes been able to bring home. “Two of them,” Alejo said, voice soft but sure. Nadia tightened her grip in that hug; at his words, her eyes had started watering, but she buried her face in the angle of his shoulder, hiding her tears in the worn fabric of his shirt. Most of her subsequent words were lost to his hearing, her voice muffled to begin with; Nadia said it quietly, possibly more for herself than for him. “Eu te amo, e eu vou voltar para você em breve.” |