AN2: Not beta’ed. We live by the typo and die by the typo, like warriors.
Intel-gathering comes naturally to Colonel Horacio Carrillo. It’s an integral part of his job, as head of the Search Bloc, for one thing.
Arguably, though, that part of his job comes naturally to him because of his childhood. A middle child, sandwiched between a golden child older brother and a much-spoiled younger sister, Horacio Carrillo long ago learned the value of sitting back quietly and watching. And learning.
To be fair, he also learned long ago that intel-gathering can be a passive art. People want to be known, to be understood. People will volunteer all sorts of information about themselves: mundane facts, dark secrets. He’s found that if he lets silence build, say, between him and an unwary suspect, the suspect will oftentimes out themselves with very few questions from him.
It’s no different with the Americans he works with. The one guy from the Embassy, the smarmy translator, is always quick to confess to his nocturnal prowling through Bogotá and Medellín, giving Carrillo more graphic details than he’d ever want to know. The secretary who helps keep all the mountains of paperwork between the DEA and CIA straight—she chatters endlessly about her ex-husband, spilling all sorts of secrets.
Agent Murphy always talks about his previous assignments, catching low-level weed dealers in the States. Talks about his wife and how they are adjusting to Colombia. Agent Peña keeps his life more closely held to the vest, but he still volunteers plenty of information about his informants at the brothel.
So it’s no different with the Americans he works with, save for one: you.
The most junior agent, completely green save for impressive case work around the cultural impact of drugs in Colombia. According to Murphy, you got scooped up by the DEA thanks to a few published papers during your master’s work, the level-headed way you intersected sociology, history, and criminal psychology. You flew through your DEA training too, a crack shot with a gun, able to handle the physical requirements.
Murphy tells him that. Not you. Carrillo can count on one hand the words you’ve exchanged with him: Nice to meet you, Colonel. Said when you met him, your warm hand in his as you shook. Five words for five fingers, and that’s about the extent of it.
He’d take it personally, but you don’t talk much at all. You let Murphy and Peña lead the charge. You sit back and watch, never missing a thing, and Carrillo wonders if maybe you’re a middle child like him, a silent observer to the world around you.
—–
Truthfully, Carrillo often forgets about you. You drift around like a ghost, silent. You nod at orders, and when you open your mouth to clarify or add your own thoughts, your voice is always rusty from disuse. Anything he knows about you is from Murphy and Peña, the things they mention. The little bits of intel Carrillo files away until he forgets about you again.
It doesn’t mean you don’t do good work. You do excellent work, in fact, old-school detective work. You run down leads, even if they are flimsy. You hit the streets and talk to the people in your formal, Castilian Spanish.
You put in the hours, often the last one there at night with Carrillo, the two of you sitting in your individual pools of light in the otherwise dark office. The most you interact during these late nights, though, are nods goodbye. Sometimes you gift him with a little half wave over your shoulder.
You listen to tape. You sift through spy plane photos. You do the hard, thankless work, and if Carrillo often forgets about you, when he does think of you, it’s with admiration for your dedication to the work.
What you do after each day, Carrillo can’t guess. If Murphy told him you go out and get blisteringly drunk, he’d believe it. If Murphy said that you go home and sit in silence on your couch until it’s morning, he’d believe that too. You’re a complete cipher, an utter mystery.
But Carrillo is hunting Pablo Escobar, and he has no time for other mysteries.
—–
The problem is that you’re green. You may be a good shot, you may be able to run a mile under the DEA’s minimum pace, but you aren’t battle-hardened the way he or Murphy or Peña are.
Every time Carrillo is in the field with you, he’s reminded of that fact. He’s startled when you appear at his side (often forgetting that his team of DEA agents is three now, not two), and he gets inwardly frustrated by the burden of keeping you safe.
You aren’t stupid by any stretch. You’re actually savvy, canny to the dangers on the streets of Medellín. You keep your head on a swivel, your hand near enough to your gun at your hip in case shit goes sideways quickly. It still goads him, though.
Carrillo mentions it to Peña once over drinks, the frustration with having a rookie in the field, and the DEA agent shakes his head.
“She’s solid, Carrillo. I wouldn’t worry so much about her.”
“She shouldn’t be in Colombia,” Carrillo argues. “She should be getting some miles under her feet in the States, where it’s quieter.”
Peña snorts and takes a sip of his beer. “You think it’s quieter in the States? Depends on the region, I guess. Along the border, in some of the cities, shit gets just as dicey.”
“She doesn’t have the experience. So she wrote a few thoughtful papers—”
“DEA cleared her for field work.” Peña interrupts, glances at the man. “Why are you bringing this up? Did something happen with her?”
Carrillo shakes his head. The two of you had been out that afternoon, on patrol in the outskirts of the city. As was your custom, you’d been a silent presence at his side all afternoon, your face inscrutable and your eyes hidden behind the mirrored aviator sunglasses you wore.
“You think maybe your issue is that she’s a woman?” Peña continues.
Carrillo bristles at the implication. “I’m not a sexist, Javier.”
The agent holds up his hands in supplication. “Neither am I. But you have to admit, it’s different, working with a woman in such a dangerous job. Throws you off your game, you know?”
The colonel nods in understanding. He’s not sexist, at least no more so than other men of his time and place. He knows that women are just as smart, just as capable…but he’s still a man of his time and place. The chivalrous side of him wants to see women safe and protected, not driving around the dangerous streets of Medellín looking for trouble.
—–
Usually, though, you aren’t with him. The closest he comes is your shared late nights, each of you at your desks as you work through transcripts and surveillance photos or other evidence.
Carrillo considers Peña’s question to him during those late nights. You are together but separate, like you are each on two islands. Would Carrillo treat Murphy that way? Would he let Peña sit in utter silence, or would he offer him a drink, chat him up a little?
One night, Carrillo walks over to your desk, and he winces at how he startles you from the deep concentration you are in. You jump, let out a little yelp of surprise.
“I’m sorry, Agent,” he tells you. “I wanted to see if you would like to order dinner, if you’re going to be here late.”
“Oh no, but thank you so much,” you tell him. Which is seven words—two more than you’ve said to him previously.
Not that Carillo is counting.
—-
Things may have always stayed the way they were—you a silent, secondhand thought to Carrillo—if Murphy hadn’t hurt himself.
It’s the tiled rooftops of Medellín that does the agent in: running after a narco, the tiles slippery after a brief, sudden rain shower. Murphy skids across a loose tile, falls off the building, and is lucky enough to have his fall broken by a shoddy lean-to propped alongside the building. The man breaks his ankle, and while it’s a clean break, it will take weeks to heal.
Murphy is moved to desk duty.
“You’re off the bench, rookie,” Peña tells you, clapping you on your back with a broad grin.
Carrillo is there, so he catches your serious nod and your murmured, “I’m ready.”
—–
Now, Carrillo finds himself spending more time with you. Peña’s always had a lone wolf streak to him, and the elder agent tends to run down his own leads (usually at the local brothels). Or, barring that, he’s in Bogotá, using his charm to beg for more resources, more money, more spy planes in the air.
Murphy, for his part, just stays at his desk and grumbles at all of the paperwork he has to do now.
So it’s Carrillo, Peña, and you, but more often than not, it’s just Carrillo and you.
He lets it go for the first week, your whole silent thing. In a day trip up to the highlands, running a checkpoint there, Carrillo suffers on the drive out, not speaking either, only sparing a glance your way from time to time. Your head is turned away from him, fixated on the scenery as the two of you leave the city behind.
It unnerves him. As the day grinds on. As he hands you a piping hot arepas from a nearby vendor for lunch (then, at least, you murmur your thanks to him). As he gives the order to his men to fall out, to head back to the city. You climb in the truck with him, and he reverses his course from the morning, now leaving the thinner, cooler air and returning to Medellín.
Maybe Carrillo is tired, or hungry, or irritated that the checkpoint yielded exactly nothing. Either way, he sounds snappish when he tells you that your silence bothers him.
You turn and face him, surprise written across your features. “You want me to talk?”
Carrillo grits his teeth. “Yes. Peña and Murphy talk all the time.”
You turn to look out your window, but he can see the way your cheek curves in an unexpected smile. He has never seen you smile before.
“What do they talk about, Colonel?”
He shrugs. “Their lives. Our work. Anything.”
You hum at that, and you tap your fingers against your knee, as if you’re thinking. “Well, I suppose I could be like Peña and talk about my informants, but I don’t frequent the brothels here.” A pause. “I guess…well, I heard that the CIA is sending up a plane tomorrow to get pictures near the border, near Panama. That might—”
Carrillo cuts you off with a shake of his head. “Actually, Agent, don’t talk about work.”
A long beat before you say, “okay.”
He thinks on it. He has no rapport with you, no inroad into who you are. He knows all of his men: their families, their interests, their quirks and habits. He knows a lot about Peña and Murphy but almost nothing about you beyond your dossier.
“Tell me one true thing about yourself,” he says, and you take so long to answer that Carrillo wonders if he’s stepped out of line somehow.
“One true thing,” you finally offer. “Okay. Well, I didn’t think I’d like Colombia at all.” You don’t look at him; you gaze out your window so he can only see the edge of your face.
“And I do really hate this work,” you continue. “But I….sort of love Colombia. I thought it would be this hot, humid warzone, but it’s so much more. The people are lovely, but it’s the land itself. I grew up in Montana, you know. It’s just this wide, empty space, and it’s beautiful in its own way, but here, everything is just….so much more. More vivid. More full of life.”
There’s a pause while you take a breath, and Carrillo sees how you clench your hand into a loose fist on your leg, as if the talking is taking real effort for you. But you keep going.
“My favorite book is One Hundred Years of Solitude. I know it’s a cliché, like saying your favorite painter is Van Gogh, but it’s true. I’ve probably read it forty times, I practically have it memorized in English, and I read it in Spanish to help me learn. But it’s just…it’s hard to explain, I guess. I thought Marquez made up Macondo, but then I came to Colombia and I realized that it’s not made up at all. That even when I’m scaring up leads on Escobar, when I’m walking around Medellín, some part of me is expecting to run into a member of the Buendía family. So I hate this work, but I take it seriously because Colombia is really a magical place, and maybe I can help keep it that way.”
When Carrillo had asked the question, he thought you’d give some quick, meaningless answer. Your favorite color, or your favorite food. He was not expecting a full-on monologue that is an incredibly intimate view into who you are.
You stop talking, and Carrillo doesn’t respond right away. He finds that his throat feels a little tight, unexpectedly: the admiration you have for his beloved country, where most Americans only look down at Colombia with distain.
“I don’t think it’s a cliché,” he finally replies, his voice rougher than usual. “It’s my favorite book too.”
You turn and gift him a smile—the first one he’s ever seen directly. Neither of you speak much after that, but he doesn’t press the issue. You’ve said more words than he can count on both hands, and he wonders if he maybe understands a part of you better than even Peña and Murphy do.
When the two of you return to Medellín, when you gather up a few things from your desk and go to leave, you don’t just do you usual nod goodbye. You call out “good night, Colonel,” and that feels momentous too.
—–
In Carrillo’s experience, people want to be known…but you seem content with making him work to know you.
After that trip to the highlands, the two of you trade intel on each other. Kind of. At stakeouts, at checkpoints, late at night when the two of you sit and eat and work through paperwork together, you trade facts about yourselves.
Sometimes you offer up some intimate fact about yourself, like when he offers up the story of how he joined the army. You’re both in his office, eating late at night, and you tell him why you decided to join the DEA when you had been on track to get your doctorate.
“I had a cousin who OD’ed,” you say simply. “So the war on drugs became personal.”
Sometimes you make a game out of it, test his interrogation abilities. There’s a midnight stake-out, the two of you perched by the window of an abandoned warehouse, watching a nearby building for cartel activity. You make an offhand comment, speculating that Carrillo’s wife must hate these late nights, and he’s startled to find that you think he’s married.
“You wear a wedding ring,” you point out reasonably.
“Just a habit,” he replies. “My ex-wife and I divorced last year.”
“Ah.” He turns and tries to study you, but your face is swathed in shadows.
“What about you?” he asks.
You shake your head, and he catches the faint smile on your face. “No, I did not get divorced last year.”
He rolls his eyes. “Funny.”
You don’t offer more, and he doesn’t ask twice. But that night—early morning, actually—when he showers and goes to bed, Carrillo finally takes off his gold wedding band, and he doesn’t put it on again.
It doesn’t occur to him until he’s just falling off into sleep that at some point, you must have actively noticed his wedding ring, and he wonders what the context of it all is.
—–
Another late night, and Carrillo has a headache thundering in his head. He dry-swallows an aspirin, and then a second, but they barely dent the pain.
So his usual professional reserve is down a bit. He foregoes the usual formality with you when you come into his office with the grease-spotted bag of arepas and a couple of bottles of Coca-Cola, the glass beaded with condensation. It’s a huge change from how the two of you used to work late at night: you used to sit separately, in silence, and now you share meals and paperwork and insight.
“Why were you so quiet when you first came here?” he asks halfway through his first arepas. You slow your own chewing, then swallow and respond.
“What do you mean?”
“You almost never spoke. You only ever said a handful of words to me.”
You smile. “And now I won’t shut up?”
Carrillo shakes his head. “No, but now you seem more…comfortable. And yes, you do talk now.”
Your smile falls a little, and you drop your eyes to the plate in front of you. “When I was going through my training, I was told that field ops can be tough on women. That older DEA agents and some of the international partners don’t take well to women in the field.”
You pause, glance at him. Return your gaze to your half-eaten food. “I thought it was just a precaution, maybe, or a heedless warning. When I got here, though, and I met you, you seemed unhappy to have a woman working with you.”
Carrillo sits up in surprise. “Why would you think that?”
“When you needed field support from the DEA, you always chose Peña or Murphy.”
“Yes, but they have more experience.”
You snort softly and shake your head. “Yes, but Murphy’s Spanish is non-existent.”
“He’s getting better,” he responds, a bit defensively.
You narrow your eyes and scoff. “Please. I know my Spanish isn’t flawless, but he asked for a jugo de pene once. I’m no local, but I’m also not running around asking Medellín street vendors for penis juice instead of pineapple juice.”
Carrillo’s breath hitches in his throat, halfway between a shocked scoff and a bark of laughter, but you ignore him and continue.
“And you didn’t even ask for me on low-risk field work. I’m really good with a surveillance camera, Colonel, and I have a good rapport with a lot of the soldiers in the Search Bloc.”
He sits back in his seat and stares at you. He hadn’t realized that you had noticed it to the degree you had, and that you had mulled it over—no, agonized over it, from the sounds of it. You keep your eyes shifted away from him, and he watches as you fiddle with your food.
“I just assumed you didn’t want a woman working with you,” you continue. “I thought you might be one of those really religious married guys who don’t like to be around women alone.”
He laughs in spite of your somber pronouncement. “Is that a thing?”
You look up and smile. “Oh, yes. I had a professor in college who was very religious. He refused to take on female T.A.’s because they might tempt him with their wicked ways. He got in trouble with the dean every semester, but he was tenured, so….” You trail off with a shrug, as if to say, what can you do about irrational men?
“So I kept my mouth shut and my head down, and I just worked as quietly and as hard as I could without drawing attention to myself.”
It hurts Carrillo to know that you thought him a sexist, and it hurts more to know that there’s a kernel of truth to it. True, he isn’t a snarling misogynist, talking down to you or using abusive language. Even so, he has been holding you back from the work because of some misbegotten desire to protect you (here, Carrillo feels a hot wash of shame course through him because yes, he does think of women as the weaker sex, as the ones who deserve protection, as the wives and mothers and daughters who don’t sign up for the greed and slaughter that men inflict).
Because yes, the women in the Search Bloc are all in office roles, translator roles. Roles that keep them out of harm’s way.
Because yes, there’s a whispering little voice in the back of Carrillo’s head, goading him in the truth of it: he had been treating you like he had treated his ex-wife. He set you firmly to the side to prevent you from seeing the ugliest parts of the war against Escobar, and he doesn’t like to consider what that really means.
“I’m sorry,” he tells you now, and he wishes he could come up with more to say, but it all sounds flimsy in his mind.
You aren’t the type to hold a grudge. You nod at him and tell him that it’s fine.
“I’ll do better,” he promises, and that earns him another nod, this time paired with a smile.
“I appreciate it, Colonel.”
—–
Colonel Carrillo does better. He does.
Murphy is back in play, and Carrillo is mindful of who he leans on. He tries to keep it fair, tries to parse out what he needs equally between the three of you. He tries to make sure you aren’t just stuck in the office, sorting through surveillance photos.
It’s hard, though. It goes against his nature, and he struggles against that protective side of himself. He hates when he knows it’s your turn, when he has to ask you to grab your tac vest because the two of you are going into dangerous territory. He hates that he thinks of you more and more, the fear burrowing into his subconscious and blooming as nightmares that leave him gasping for breath when he wakes up.
Nightmares about you dying, bleeding out in his arms. Nightmares about sending your body back to Montana packed in dry ice. Nightmares about not being there when something goes to shit, having to go to the morgue to identify your remains.
Carrillo doesn’t have these fears about Peña or Murphy, and at first he thinks it’s his latent, benign sexism, but it comes over him late one night.
It’s also love.
There is no thunderclap of love at first sight; you creep over him slowly, over time. The more you open up to him, the more he falls for you, until he wakes up one night—not from a nightmare, but from a different sort of dream about you.
He wonders if it’s just the war against the cartel finally taking it’s toll. Maybe he’s too lonely. Too focused. Maybe the line is blurry because he sees you all the time.
He doesn’t think so, though. He had his ex-wife, but he let her go easily enough. If it was just loneliness and the war, he would have fought harder for her. But he and Juliana had been drifting apart anyway, just as their marriage settled into its middle period, and Carrillo had found that he didn’t exactly have much in common with his now ex-wife.
You, though? He gets you. He feels a sort of kinship to you, and he examines the entire thing for a long time before he realizes that it’s not just working together. You have a quiet sensibility, a razor-sharp intellect. You take pride in a job well done, and Carrillo likes that about you.
You also have a side that he only sees occasionally, the hidden-away parts that he thinks you hold close to yourself. An off-color sense of humor, a wry way of cocking an eyebrow when one of your jokes lands. A real, abiding love of people too—not at all jaded by your experience with the cartel. You truly seem to care about the everyday people of Colombia, and it makes Carrillo love you even more.
So yes, it is love. Carrillo resigns himself to it, knows that it will be a painful thing to keep at bay.
Still, it’s not nearly as painful as calling out your name, telling you to grab your tac vest. There’s a raid in a seedy Medellín neighbor that afternoon, and it’s your turn to join him.
—–
It goes bad, almost right from the start. Later, they’ll realize that it was a half-assed set-up, an ambush set up by a pair of bumbling, low-level narcos trying to win Escobar’s attention.
Later, they’ll call the narcos bumbling, but only because no one is seriously hurt. But the potential for real casualties is there, and it changes everything.
It starts when a side street is blocked off by a stalled-out truck, which pushes the column of Search Bloc vehicles into another street. It’s narrower, slower-going.
It’s a trap.
The trap is sprung after Carrillo’s men—and you—are out of the trucks and away from the cover they offer. Then the firing starts, and everyone scatters. Falls back into doorways, into the cover of other vehicles.
Carrillo loses sight of you. Spits out a curse, tries to call on his radio to see if Trujillo has eyes on you. The radio goes to static, the signal blocked out somehow by the narcos.
Carrillo curses again, ducks into the doorway of a restaurant. He takes a steadying breath, takes in the scene. There’s a narco on the low roof across the street, and Carrillo makes an easy end of him. Then another, there, behind the stack of pallets. Another, there, peeking around the corner of a building.
The pops and bangs of gunfire is steady, but then they decrease. Little by little it dies off, and Carrillo catches a glimpse of Search Bloc fatigues. Realizes that his side is winning this little skirmish.
Nothing to do but to go find you. He sends a silent prayer up to heaven as he slides out from the safety of the restaurant and scans the street. It’s clear, so he runs—quick, low to the ground—to the alley that cuts across.
He scans the alley quick, but his heart is thudding in his ears. He feels like a rookie again, feels the sick flood of adrenaline coursing through his veins. Where are you? Did you find cover? Are you hit, are you bleeding out like in his nightmares—
The thought is cut off. A narco, just a skinny boy, really, steps out from behind a stack of crates. The gun in his hand looks huge, a cannon, and it’ll throw the kid backwards when he fires it, Carrillo thinks, and he doesn’t have time to swing his own gun around—
Something hits him like a fucking truck. Carrillo is aware of three things happening at once: he’s struck from behind by something, and there’s the sound of two gunshots, and the skinny boy’s head disappears in a cloud of blood and brain matter.
It takes a while for the ringing in his ears to stop, and only then does Carrillo piece together that split second that saved his life: you tackling him, Trujillo right on your heels, shooting the narco.
—–
War is a funny thing sometimes. Carrillo has seen men handle battles as smoothly as a robot, only to fall apart later when things are calm and quiet. It’s never happened to him, but he’s seen it in other men.
It happens to him now.
He is cool and collected in the alley. He brushes himself off, does a quick scan of you and Trujillo. Sees that you’re okay. Processes the scene, calls for support to take photos and cart away the bodies of the cartel men. His own men are fine, the worst injury his own bruised knees from when you tackled him.
He only falls apart back at the office. The adrenaline drops off, and he’s left with all of the anxious, fearful feelings that it had masked.
But he doesn’t cry.
Colonel Horacio Carrillo yells.
Specifically at you.
It doesn’t start as yelling. He only tries to tell you, in his soft-voiced, quiet way, that what you did was dangerous. Reckless. Against protocol. Charging into a blind alley with your weapon holstered was blatantly stupid, and it could have gotten you killed—
“I’m sorry,” you tell him, but you don’t look contrite. You gaze back at him without an ounce of regret. “I only saw the guy raise his gun at you and I just acted.”
Any other day, any other situation, Carrillo would leave it at that. He’d go into his office and pour himself a double, then sip at it until his hands stop shaking. He nods at you, but when you turn away, he sees it: a long split in the back of your tac vest, the edges black and burnt.
The skinny boy’s bullet, he realizes. When you tackled him, he had heard two shots. The boy’s bullet must have just skimmed past you, a hair’s breadth away from killing you.
Carrillo sees red.
“You just acted?” he asks, and you stop and turn to face him, your expression one of surprise. You had thought the conversation was over.
“I didn’t—”
“You didn’t think. You didn’t follow protocol.” He takes a step closer to you, and you shrink away from him a little.
“This isn’t a game, Agent. This isn’t some paper for university. This is life and death, and if you cannot follow the rules we have to keep you safe, then you need to get the fuck out of Colombia before you get yourself killed. Understand?”
There’s a film of tears in your eyes, and that quiet voice in Carrillo’s head tuts in shame to have made you cry, but you don’t give him the satisfaction. You blink them away. You square your shoulders and tilt your head up at him.
“I asked if you understand, Agent,” he repeats, his voice low and deadly, your title a sneer in his mouth.
“I understand,” you tell him, and your voice is steady even if your eyes are shiny with unshed tears. “Colonel.”
—–
Anyone else would have fled. There’s an awkward tension in the office. Everyone scurries around, not making eye contact, mindful of the scene they all witnessed. Mindful of the Colonel and his roused temper, mindful to not pull his attention to them.
Anyone else would have fled. You sit and shrug out of your tac vest, and Carrillo watches as you notice the bullet hole. You trace a fingertip over it, study the burnt edge of the tear. Then you set the vest aside and get to work on some paperwork.
At some point, Murphy stops by. Bends his head close to yours, and Carrillo sees you smile, then shake your head. He can only wonder what the two of you are saying.
Then Peña, later. The man perches on the edge of your desk, says something that makes you laugh. But another shake of your head, and Peña gesturing, and more laughing. It makes a spike of jealousy flare up in him, and between that and the drop in adrenaline (and the bruised knees), Carrillo feels like shit.
One by one, people leave for the day. You get up and leave, but you come back with dinner, and you sit in your lonely pool of light in the dark office, just like you had in the beginning. No more sharing meals in his office, Carrillo guesses.
Anyone else would have slunk away at the end of the night, but when you finish up your paperwork, you stand up, pull on your jacket. You square your shoulders in that way you have, and you march into Carrillo’s office.
You don’t knock. You stand there, fists clenched at your side, and you return fire.
“I take it back,” you tell him, and your voice is shaky, but not with tears. With anger, this time, he guesses.
“I take back my apology,” you continue. “I’m not sorry. Fuck your rules and fuck your protocol. The rules of war were for a different time and place, and the only rules now are to not get killed. Trujillo and I saved your ass out there, so no, I’m notsorry.”
He sits back in his chair and studies you. You stare back at him, challenging him, and Carrillo isn’t sure what is hotter: the way you’re staring him down, or the way you’re standing up to him, or the way you’re casually tossing around the word fuck, because he’s not sure he’s ever heard you swear before. You’re fiery and pissed in a way he didn’t think possible for you, and he finds that he really, really likes it.
“Is that so?” he asks.
You nod. “It is. And furthermore, fuck you for reading me the riot act in front of everyone. Steve can barely string together two words in Spanish, and Javi’s screwing his way through half the brothels in the city, and you can’t tell me that between the two of them, they haven’t broken more rules than me. Yet I don’t see you dressing them down in public.”
That’s what wins out then, you standing up to him. That’s the hottest, he decides, the slight tremble to your voice, but how sure you say the words anyway. The way you’re chancing it, telling him off, the greenest agent standing up for herself against the head of the Search Bloc.
This is the moment his love for you—a flat, one-dimensional thing, a vague, hazy love based on the scant knowledge he has on you—becomes a faceted thing. It takes on shading, depth. It’s deepened by lust. Before, he only had that nebulous unrequited love, but now you’re standing in his doorway, staring him down, saying fuck you.
Carrillo wonders, suddenly, what it would be like to fight with you. To squabble domestically, then to make love afterwards in that messy, desperate way that make-up sex sometimes is.
He doesn’t stand up and walk over to you. Seated behind his desk is safe: if he gets too close to you, his thin control may snap. He may reach for you, may want to feel the solid weight of you like he had in the alley when you tackled him. You had touched him in that moment, your hand cupping his face, your eyes studying him for injury.
“I apologize for yelling at you in front of everyone,” he finally concedes. “But I won’t apologize for yelling at you. Your safety is my number one priority.”
You scoff at him. “Your number one priority is Escobar.”
“Two number one priorities, then. But I will send you back to the States if you pull a stunt like that again. I’d rather see you demoted than dead with a posthumous medal.”
“It’s fine—”
He shakes his head, frustrated that you aren’t understanding him. That he can’t say the words directly and can only come at them from a slant.
“Don’t you ever get between me and a bullet again, Agent,” he clarifies. “I keep you safe, not the other way around.”
“You wouldn’t say that to Steve or Javi.”
“No, I wouldn’t. Only you.” He doesn’t add more; you can think him a sexist, but he stares at you a long beat and something in his expression must give him away. You narrow your eyes at him at first, but then some realization washes over you. You shift your eyes away from his, mumble something about going home, and you leave him as quickly as you can manage without breaking into a dead run.
*****
You knew you’d be up against it in Colombia. Your first day in Bogotá, at the Embassy when you worked through the mountains of paperwork to start your assignment, you’d been hyper-aware of the leers and whispered commentary from the embassy assholes.
You could guess what they were saying. They were either accusing you of being hired just because you were a woman…or worse.
You knew you’d have to work twice as hard. That you’d have to bite back your temper, smile at the innuendos, ignore the blatant sexism.
Steve and Javier turn out to be less of an issue that you had thought they’d be. The worst they ever call you is rookie, which is fair, but they never make you feel inadequate.
Even the Colombians in the Search Bloc are grateful for another body—Trujillo and others happy to have another agent to help hunt down Escobar.
Colonel Carrillo was the only issue, and that fades away once the two of you gain some understanding and working rapport. Once you put aside the trepidation from when you first met him, when he turned that stern face of his towards you, unsmiling as he shook your hand.
Carrillo was an issue, then he wasn’t. Now he’s back to being an issue, but you think you’ve misread it.
Maybe his strange reluctance to use you in the field wasn’t sexism at all. After the botched raid, after you tackled him (you had hit him harder than you had intended, unsure of how much force you’d need to bring down the solid bulk of him, and your shoulder ached from where you had hit him), things turn weird.
You’re torqued up from the raid. Torqued from the brush with death, the singed line on your vest tangible proof that you were within inches of a bullet. Torqued from Carrillo berating you in front of everyone, and then the slow simmer of your anger as you sit and work through paperwork.
Torqued enough to march into his office that evening and berate him back, half-spoiling for an actual, drag-out, knock-down fight. He disappoints; he doesn’t fight you. He concedes with a half-apology, but then it turns weird.
He says his job is to keep you safe. He orders you to never step between him and harm again.
It doesn’t feel like sexism to you. There’s something in his eyes when he says it, his stern expression belied by a pleading look in his eyes. The way they widen a little, like he’s foreseen your death. The barest bit of entreating in his voice, the ragged edge so faint you almost miss it.
You get flustered. You flee, and you spend the rest of the evening replaying the moment in his office. The steady way he had stared at you, the implication of what he was leaving unsaid.
You shower. You crawl into your bed. You stare up at the cracked plaster of your bedroom ceiling, and you wonder if maybe you imagined it. Maybe you read too much into it, and maybe everything will be clear in the morning.
It doesn’t matter, in the end. Something about the mere thought of Colonel Carrillo being protective of you, of him thinking it’s his job to keep you safe…the thought nestles in your head. You dream about him—that solid, goddamned bulk of him underneath you—and you wake up before dawn, sweaty and irritated from the faint ache of desire between your thighs.
“Shit,” you mutter in the quiet of your bedroom. “Shit, shit, shit.”
—–
That day, you wonder if you had imagined the entire scene late at night with Carrillo. He greets you with his usual terse nod, and then he goes into his office. He barely even looks at you, and you breathe out a sigh of relief.
The day goes easy. You and Javi listen to fresh tape, wiretaps that haven’t been translated yet. Steve tips you a wink, calls you troublemaker, before he heads out early for a meeting at the embassy.
You don’t see Carrillo again that day, and you leave at a reasonable hour—no late night, tonight—and when you go to sleep, you think that yes, you must have imagined everything.
Which doesn’t help you much, now that he’s burrowed into your subconscious. But a harmless little crush is manageable, you figure. You can keep it tamped down. You can manage it.
*****
You regress nearly all the way back to silent, the way you had been before, and Carrillo isn’t sure why.
Was it dressing you down in the middle of the office, then only half-walking it back in private? Or did you guess at his feelings for you, that quiet never-miss-a-thing way you have?
Carrillo guesses it’s the latter. You’ve always been a professional before, but now your silence is paired with evasive action. You struggle to make eye contact with him now. When it’s your turn to join him in the field, you defer to Murphy or Peña. Before, you had downplayed your rookie status, but now you seem to play it up to get out of working with him.
He gives it a month, and then he resigns himself to the fact that he has to address it. Late afternoon, the office emptying out, Carrillo calls you into his office. Gestures for you to sit down and offers you a drink, which you decline with a polite shake of your head.
“You’ve been avoiding field work,” he says.
You drop your eyes and study your hands, folded in your lap. “I think my time is better served in the office,” you say, and your voice is quiet. “You were right, about me being stupid the day of the raid. I could have gotten someone killed.”
Maybe he guessed wrong after all. Maybe you hadn’t noticed how he felt, maybe he had kept his feelings hidden enough from your studious gaze. A thought occurs to him.
“Was that the first time you’d ever been shot at?” he asks.
You glance at him, and you nod.
He tsks at that. Chastises himself silently: he had been so wrapped up in his own feelings, he hadn’t considered the fall-out of the raid on you. You were a rookie, and you didn’t have the practical field experience. Peña and Murphy had been in gun fights. You hadn’t until that day, and you had come out of it with a close call. Now, it seemed, your nerves were getting the best of you.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks gently.
You huff out a breath. “Would you ask Steve or Javi?”
“No, only you. They’ve been through it before.”
“I’m okay, Colonel.”
“It’d be okay if you aren’t.” A beat. “I’m sure you can talk to your fellow agents if you don’t want to talk to me.”
You gaze back at him, and the sudden eye contact after several weeks of you avoiding him feels intimate. He wonder what you see when you look at him, the thoughtful way you study him.
“Maybe you can help me,” you finally say.
“Anything.”
“I put in a req for a new vest with the DEA, but I still haven’t gotten it. So I put in a second req, and then a third, and still nothing. I know I shouldn’t wear my old vest, now that it’s been….damaged…”
Carrillo sits back in his seat and grits his teeth. The Americans are weirdly stingy on some things, like functional equipment for their agents. For the things that will keep them safe. Because you’re right—a bulletproof vest that’s taken a bullet is no longer useful. Wearing a damaged vest into the field could get you killed. His temper flares up at your agency, not taking your safety seriously.
And that protective side of him flares up bright too.
“I can help with that,” he says, and he stands up. “Come on.”
He leads you out of his office and down the hallway to the equipment room. He keys in and holds the door for you, and you walk past him, close enough to catch the warm scent of you, close enough to feel the near-brush of you against him. He grits his teeth again, fights down the memory of you tackling him, that brief moment of you on top of him, your hand on his face, studying him for injury—
“Can I get a new gun too?” you ask, breaking his reverie, and he turns to see where you’re pointing at the semi-automatics racked along the back wall. You have a small smile on your face, and he smiles too to see it.
“Do you know how to use a gun like that?”
You shake your head, and he gestures to the other wall where the uniforms and tac vests are. He steps ahead of you and pulls a few vests from the shelf, judging your size.
“Try these.” He hands them to you, and he takes a step back. Watches you take one, hold it up to you. Watches you reject it without trying it on, and you hand it back to him. Then he watches you try on the other, smiles when it gets caught on your hair as you pull it over your head.
He moves without even thinking. The moment feels domestic, mundane. It feels like the ordinary intimacy he’d had with his ex-wife for a short period, when she’d ask for help zipping up a dress or latching a bracelet onto her wrist.
Carrillo moves now without thinking, and he reaches out to free your hair caught on the strip of thick Velcro. You don’t see him reaching for you—your eyes are covered by the vest, half-on and half-off you—but when you feel his hand, you jump. His hand brushes against the back of your neck, the warm, soft skin under his fingertips. You twist away but run into the shelf, and the vest gets tangled worse in your hair.
“Hold still,” he says, and he reaches out again when you stop moving. He gently untangles your hair, pulls it free from the Velcro. Then he reaches down and takes the sides of the vest, pulls it down securely on your body and frees your head.
“Thanks,” you mumble.
And because his hands are already on you, he does up the straps—loops them through the metal guides, secures the vest on your form, and he knows he’ll think of this moment later, being so close to you. Studying the way the vest hides some of your lovely curves but not completely. Taking in the warm scent of you. Noticing the way you seem to hold your breath as he adjusts the vest on you.
“How’s it feel?” he asks.
“Like I could run across a roof in it,” you joke weakly.
Carrillo chuckles softly. He smooths his thumb over the Colombian flag stitched onto the shoulder of the vest, feels a strange thrill to see you in his country’s colors, el Tricolor Nacional, instead of the DEAabbreviation.
“I should have thanked you for saving me that day,” he says, and his voice is soft. He doesn’t look you in the eye; he fixes his gaze on the embroidered flag. “I’m sorry I snapped the way I did, when I should have thanked you first and foremost.”
You shake your head. “No need to thank me. Like I had said, I was just sort of acting. On instinct, I mean. I saw the gun, and I just….moved.”
“You hit me harder than I thought someone your size could,” he teases, pulling his gaze up to your face.
“It must have been the adrenaline.” You smile at him, almost a smirk. Smirk-adjacent. “I wrenched my shoulder. It was like tackling a mountain.”
His hand moves on its own, releases its hold on the edge of your vest to reach down and take your hand. He doesn’t even realize it until he feels your hand in his own, and after a beat, you give him a gentle squeeze.
But you don’t pull away.
“Thank you, Agent,” he tells you. “You saved my life.”
You nod, and you open your mouth to say something, but nothing comes out. So you nod again, and Carrillo’s gaze slips from your eyes down to your mouth, to your perfectly shaped lips that he’s contemplated for countless sleepless nights.
He bends his head without any thought. He doesn’t even realize it until he hears your soft intake of breath the split second before he kisses you. The by-the-book part of him, the straight-laced leader of the Search Bloc despairs at this egregious breach of conduct, but that part of him is silenced so quickly…because you kiss him back.
It’s only a kiss that evening in the supply closet. It’s only his mouth against yours. One of his hands curled around the back of your neck, the other hand lightly resting on your waist. You wrap one of your hands around his bicep, but the other slides through his short-cropped hair, your fingernails scratching against his scalp.
He doesn’t even kiss you deeply—he knows that his control is on a hair-trigger, so he breaks the kiss before it gets too heated. He closes his eyes and takes a steadying breath, and he kisses your forehead.
“Promise me you won’t get between me and a bullet again though,” he murmurs against your head. “Promise me that.”
“I promise,” you whisper back.
*****
In the midst of the war against Escobar, as busy as he is, Horacio Carrillo finds the time and energy to romance you.
He doesn’t just seduce you. It isn’t one of those tawdy hookups, like between some embassy employees and Colombian nationals. It isn’t like Javi and his informants and how some of them toe the line at almost-relationships.
No, Horacio—which is what you call him when you aren’t at work—romancesyou.
He sends flowers to your apartment. He brings flowers, that first time he comes over. That evening when you make dinner, when he sits at your little table in his impeccable white polo shirt and perfectly pressed khakis, as if it isn’t weird to see him out of uniform and in your apartment. He brings wine too, and you should be nervous, but if he soothes your fears in the field, he soothes your nervousness here too. He leads you slowly, step by step. He kisses you until you relax, then he kisses you deeper. He undresses you like you’re a gift, his eyes going dark as he reveals more and more of you to his heavy gaze.
He takes your hands in his own, encourages you to touch him. To undress him in turn. Which doesn’t take much encouragement: you’ve dreamt of this, fantasized about it.
Your fantasies pale at the genuine article. Horacio is built: muscular, but functionally so. They’re muscles earned by his work in the Search Bloc, by staying prepared for anything. The broad span of his chest and shoulders, the barest bit of belly makes your mouth run dry with desire.
Horacio makes love the way he works, which is to say: he’s devastatingly efficient. He takes his time. He’s thorough. He disassembles you with his thick fingers, then settles between your thighs and undoes you with his mouth. Already he’s given you more than even your best boyfriend from before, but when he finally climbs on top of you, you think, this man is going to ruin other men for me.
For all his ministrations, nothing can quite prepare you for the feeling of him pushing into you, the blunt crown of his cock nudging against your swollen and sensitive folds. The careful way he eases into you, his dark eyes studying your face for pain. Finding none, he buries himself in you, the thick stretch of him almost too much but perfectly perfect, the thinnest thread of pain woven into the sharp shard of pleasure deep inside you.
Afterwards, he’s just as romantic, in that efficient way he has. He disposes of the used condom, returns from your bathroom with a warm washcloth. Helps you clean yourself up, then scoops up all of the discarded clothing on the floor. He folds it all neatly, then climbs into bed with you.
You hadn’t lied before: you do think Colombia is a magical place. But as you fall asleep against Horacio’s broad chest, his slightly-calloused hand stroking patterns against your bare back, you think you have the best part of the country, right here in your bed.
*****
The thing with you doesn’t make it any easier for Carrillo. If anything, it makes working with you more difficult.
It’s easy to hide the relationship. You’re both consummate professionals, and Carrillo doubts anyone notices anything. The kiss in the supply closet was a one-time thing. Neither of you ever repeat it; you keep your work relationship professional and only indulge in your personal relationship in the scant few hours when you aren’t working.
He sleeps at your place. You sleep at his. You steal as many moments as you can before you both fall asleep, exhausted by your grueling hours at work.
Carrillo, for the first time, wishes for the war to end for selfish reasons. He wishes he had the luxury of time: an entire long evening to just lounge with you. An entire uninterrupted weekend to take you somewhere nice, to make love to you near the ocean, to sit in public at a restaurant and not worry about who may see you.
But the logical part of him knows that if the war with Escobar ends, you’ll go back to the States. Or to some other front. Maybe you’ll go to Afghanistan to fight against heroin, or to the Eastern Bloc to fight the new synthetic drugs there.
So he exists in a wonderful, painful sort of hell. Savors each moment with you, knows that it all has an expiration date.
Having you in his bed doesn’t help with the nightmares he has about you, though. He still dreams of you dying in his arms, dreams of you choking on your own blood in a Medellín alleyway. Sometimes he jerks awake so hard that he wakes you, and it’s double torture: the nightmare lingering in his head, paired with the drowsy way you try to soothe him back to sleep. You always pull his head down to you, nestle him against your chest until the steady thumping of your heart calms his own racing pulse.
*****
The cartel has been quiet, which should be a clue that shit is about to start back up. But you’ve been lulled into a false sense of security along with your fellow agents.
Steve knocks off early that afternoon, plans to surprise Connie by making dinner for her. Javi drifts off to wherever he usually goes, probably to one of the brothels under the guise of getting intel.
When a reliable tip comes in, it leaves you to go out with Horacio. Or Carrillo, rather: you’re mindful to keep the two names separate in your head to help you compartmentalize the secret relationship you have from the professional one.
You put on your tac vest. You check your gun and holster it. Then you join Carrillo and his men, and you head out into the heart of Medellín.
If the moment feels like that first ambush, you miss the signs the second time around. There’s no broken down car to divert the column of Search Bloc vehicles into narrow streets. There’s no hail of gunfire once you all climb out of your trucks and swarm the building.
The narcos are savvier, this time around: they wait until half of the soldiers are in the building before they open fire.
Like before, you scatter. You find cover, and you feel the way your heart seems to be in your throat, making it harder to breathe. The way an animal panic seems to wash over you, chanting in your ear to flee, flee, flee.
You take a deep breath instead. You breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth. You curl your free hand into a fist and allow the bite of pain from your fingernails to center you in the moment. You raise your gun in your other hand, and you study the scene in front of you. The chaos of it. Your magical Colombia dirtied up by the business of drugs.
You were never really cut out for this work, in the end. You were a scholar. You loved learning, and understanding, and teaching. You were never going to shine as a soldier, no matter how well you’d done in your basic DEA training. You don’t have the knack for it, this bloody fieldwork, or the experience.
When you look to the left, you see it. You see him. Colonel Carrillo, in that low crouched run that all of the seasoned soldiers have, that you haven’t mastered.
You see the way his head turns on a swivel, the way he sweeps left and right and clears the path in front of him from obstacles.
He doesn’t see the narco who steps out of the shadows behind him. Carrillo doesn’t see him, but you do.
You were never cut out for this work. Protocol, procedures aren’t drilled into you the way it is the soldier of the Search Bloc. You see your beloved Horacio, you see the narco raising his gun, and you just act.
You had promised him to never get between him and a bullet. It’s a promise you can’t keep.
You don’t tackle him this time. You only shield him. You take the bullet for him, and it hits you low, where the vest doesn’t cover. And it isn’t like in the movies where you don’t feel it: you fucking feel it the very second it tears its path through you, a line of pain that sears like fire.
The moment you’re shot, time starts to blink out. Darkness passes over you; you wake up with the bright blue Colombian sky burning your eyes. You blink, and the sky is blotted out by Carrillo. By Horacio.
He’s saying something. He’s yelling. You don’t understand a word of it, and you wonder if he’s slipped into a language you don’t know, but some words come through. It’s you—your hearing is like you’re underwater, everything distorted and garbled.
Colombia is usually so hot, but you feel cold. You shiver, and something about the motion makes Horacio yell more.
It occurs to you that you’ve never told him how you feel. You grew up in a staunchly Protestant family, quiet people who never discussed feelings. When you graduated from high school, your father had shaken your hand, for example. You weren’t naturally expressive. Not emotional. It took a while to plumb those feelings in any relationship, and you hadn’t gotten to that point with Horacio yet.
You should tell him now. It feels urgent, especially as the cold grows, seems to sink into your very bones. You shiver again, and Horacio bends his head close to you, tries to tell you something. He nods encouragingly, offers you a smile that trembles around the edges of his lips.
You try to tell him that you love him. You open your mouth, but the only word that comes out is cold.
And then you slip away.
*****
Javier Peña has never minded that his fellow agents and Search Bloc compatriots think him a lothario. He knows the truth of the intel he gets, no matter the method: he’s helping to track down Pablo Escobar, and he’ll do it by any means necessary.
What he does mind is that his fellow agents and Search Bloc compatriots must think him an idiot.
You and Carrillo, for example. Javi guesses that Steve has never noticed, but he did right away. The two of you are good—better than he would have given either of you credit for. The two of you are so professional that Javi sometimes thinks he’s imagined it: the way your eyes linger on the Colonel for just a split-second longer than polite. The single time the Carrillo half-raised his hand as you walked past him, like he had wanted to lay his palm on the small of your back.
It’s so fucking subtle, Javi wonders if he imagines it.
At the hospital, after he gets the call, there’s no doubt that you and Carrillo have been involved. The Colonel always takes the injuries and deaths of those under his command hard—Javi has seen him, more than once, pull out rosary beads, or take a quiet knee in a corner to commune with god.
This is different. With you hurt, Carrillo is a man unhinged. An animal pacing in the small waiting room, his jaw flexing with how hard he’s clenched. Javi studies him closer and sees all of the blood on his uniform—your blood, he guesses—and his heart sinks.
When Carrillo turns to him, Javi sees the tears in the man’s eyes. Sees the tracks that earlier tears have already cut through the soot and sweat of the ambush.
“That bullet was meant for me,” he tells him, and all Javi can do is sit with him and wait.
—–
It takes a long time for you to get out of surgery—a risky affair, since you’ve lost so much blood, and since the bullet cut a jagged path through your body. It takes a long time for the hospital to get you set up in a secure room, and when they can finally see you, Carrillo practically shoves Javi aside to get to you first.
It’s ghastly. The figure in the bed doesn’t even look like you. There’s a million wires. A thick plastic tube down your throat doing your breathing for you. You look like you’ve been carved out of wax, and Carrillo makes a sound in the back of his throat that sounds like a wounded animal.
“She’s strong, Horacio,” Javi says, and he hopes he sounds convincing.
“That bullet was meant for me,” the Colonel repeats, whispering it as he settles in a chair beside your bed, as he takes your limp hand in his own. “Why did she step in front of it when I made her promise she wouldn’t?”
Because she loves you, Javi wants to say. Because you would have done the same thing for her without a second thought.
“She’s strong,” he only repeats. “She’ll pull through this.”
—–
You do pull through it, eventually, but when you finally wake up, the world is a different place than the one you left.
Once you are stabilized in your coma, Colonel Carrillo goes on a fucking tear through Colombia. Raids, checkpoints. He runs down every single flimsy lead, pulls in every narco, suspected narco, and cousins-of-narcos. He stops going home, only grabs an hour or two of sleep in the cot he puts in his office.
Carrillo turns feral. And when that feral edge starts to dull, he just sits with you in the hospital—holds your hand, begs you to wake up, reads to you from a battered paperback copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude—and the edge is sharpened again, just like that.
You stay in a coma for a month. A month is all it takes for Carrillo to overplay his hand. He lines up a handful of kids—some actual kids, with the chubby-faced freshness of youth, and some almost-men, with fuzzy first attempts at facial hair. Young boys pressed into service for the cartel, lookouts and runners.
Carrillo shoots one in the head. He hands another a bullet with a message for Escobar.
It’s a bad play. Carrillo’s rough play finally turns on him, and he’s sent to Madrid.
“I’m going to retire early,” he tells Javi. “I cannot go to Spain and leave her here. She still hasn’t woken up…” He trails off, and Javi can guess the rest: Carrillo doesn’t want to be in Madrid if it goes the other way. If you die instead of waking up.
“Steve and I are here. Connie too. You know Trujillo will keep you updated as well.” He reaches out and lays a hand on Carrillo’s shoulder. “She wouldn’t want you to throw away your career for this.”
—–
In the end, Carrillo goes to Spain. You wake up a week later. A month in a coma, and then months of rehab afterwards: to regain all of the lost muscle you had lost while you slept. You regain your strength and flexibility. For the first few weeks after you wake up, you stay in the restricted unit of the hospital, and you don’t ask for Carrillo.
You do ask for him once you are stabilized and moved to the rehabilitation wing. You don’t realize that Javi knows about the two of you, and it’s heartbreakingly adorable how casually you try to ask after the Colonel.
“You can cut the shit with me, rookie,” he tells you with a smile. “The two of you hid it really well, but I’m just thatgood.”
Javi breaks the news to you. He catches you up on the war against Escobar. He takes your hand when you start to cry, when you realize that Carrillo is half a world away.
—–
The DEA cuts you loose. No hard feelings, but you’ve been seriously hurt in the field and it’s protocol. You’re handed a nice piece of paper with nice words on it, you’re given a nice paycheck for your injuries in the service of Uncle Sam, and then you are free to do whatever you want.
Javi is in your apartment as you finish packing. You don’t have much; the handful of boxes of the things you’re taking with you have already been sent to the States. You fold clothing neatly, tuck it
I have about 15 different subjects waiting in my art queue, but then I saw this image from the Talk Easy podcast and couldn’t help myself. What a breathtaking smile!
I’m pretty shy when it comes to interacting on here but I wanted to show my undying appreciation for @the-ginger-hedge-witch‘s incredible story, which has had me absolutely yearning for weeks!!
requested by: a wonderful anon <3 i also caught the other request you sent in, and am working on that!! thank you so much for the wonderful ideas, keep them coming! warnings: mentions of prostitution, general seductive (i hope) behaviour.
You looked up from your novel. Isabella’s eyes flicked away from you, gaze suddenly very intent out the window. You didn’t shuffle in your seat, even though it was uncomfortable. You didn’t shrink away, didn’t even care. She was a queen, sure.
But on this plane, you were thequeen.
You laid your book in your lap and openly looked over at Felix, watching him as he sat opposite you.
He wasn’t looking at you at first, but he must have felt your gaze. He turned to you too, and though you couldn’t see his eyes through his shades, you knew he was looking back at you. You smiled. He nodded, face straight and neck stiff.
That was it. The whole interaction.
The sea was visible through the window, wide and blue - you were on your way to Mexico.
You weren’t entirely sure how; you were of no use to Felix really, but somehow you convinced him. A Colombian, and better yet, a Colombian prostitute known to have previously been with the Medellin cartel. You were basically a flashing sign to all of the authorities saying that Felix was now in the cocaine business, but he still brought you.
Clearly, he could care less. He knew he was untouchable.
You retracted your stare from the sea, directed it back at Felix, and noticed he was still looking at you. Or at least, your general direction.
You decided to test it. You opened your novel once more, Felix clear in your peripheral vision. You scooted in your seat only slightly, your dress riding up a little to expose your thighs, which you then crossed, expression neutral and airy as you could manage.
Felix stiffened, cleared his throat, and promptly turned his face to the window.
Gotcha.
He’d been cold to you, calloused, and strategically you were useless to him. But he’d let you board his plane. This was why.
You settled back with your book, smug on the inside, but it only lasted a few minutes.
He called your name, and that choppy accent made his words seem harsher than they needed to be. “You’re gonna dye your hair, change your name. And you’re not Colombian anymore - its best you drown that accent. The job I have for you will take a new identity, and manipulation.”
“The… job?”
“You didn’t think I brought you here for nothing, did you?”
It took control to keep your lips from pressing together sourly. Instead, you focused on keeping your face lax, your brows raised patiently, though inside you were reeling. “Well, no.” Not even a lie.
Isabella knew what you meant, you could see it in her face. But you wouldn’t be humiliated. “I can manipulate, Felix. How else would I have got on this plane?”
Imagine meeting Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo as part of the Medellin cartel.
requested by: anon. thank you sO MUCH, anon, i’ve been dying to write for narcos: mexico. if you have anymore ideas, please please shoot them in. i’d love to write for kiki too, and i think rafa could be an interesting lad to write. send more narcos meixco !! <3 warnings: implied prostitution, alcohol, mentioned drugs (of course).
He was so uncomfortable. Back straight against the couch, a glass of tequila in hand and the bottle sat by his ankles. Poison had insisted it was all they had left along with a sombrero - it wasn’t true. But a Mexican narco in the heart of the Medellin cartel would never be anything but the butt of the joke, even if he was as calculated as Felix Gallardo.
Between the attentive minutes you had to give to certain men, you’d watched him for almost an hour, playing his role, pretending like he fit in, like he could talk to these animals. Honestly, he did a good job of it, to the point that you almost questioned if he knew they were laughing at him. But the tightness of his shoulders and the set of his brow told you otherwise.
This was a smart man. Perhaps he could help you.
The woman he brought with him, who hadn’t left his side all evening, finally whispered something low in his ear and headed towards the bathroom. You seized your chance.
You unfolded your legs and approached him, bending low until your fingers grasped the bottle of tequila at his ankle, returning to upright slowly, his gaze like a weight on you. You raised a delicate brow and tipped your head, gesturing outside. “Come outside, unless you want to spend your evening with these assholes.”
You didn’t wait for a reply before heading outside, only glancing over your shoulder when you were out of sight of the majority of the party, and sure enough, he was following behind you.
The gazebo was quiet once you’d dismissed a smoking sicario or two. You placed the bottle on a chair and leant against the ledge. The air was tropical, almost sweet to the taste, and the sound of the hippopotamus wallowing was gentle, peaceful in the distance.
Footsteps approached. Gallardo’s. You could tell from only hearing that he walked well, confidently. A strong man in the face of pressure. That must be what got him here today, under the radar of such a dangerous man as your boss.
He settled beside you, joining you in leaning against the ledge, looking out to the lake. He didn’t speak for a while, but when he did, he didn’t sound as dangerous as you imagined. His voice was casual, gentle even, a hint of a laugh in his tone. “Do hippos like Mexicans?”
You couldn’t help the snort that escaped. You turned to look at him, a brow arched, “I don’t know. But I imagine they like you more than the guys in there do.”
“I didn’t come here for them to like me.”
Bullshit. “You never meant to come here, did you?” His confused, somewhat hostile expression hardened as he looked at you. You raised your fingers to his eyebrow, which was only beginning to come up in a light bruise. “Well, you were shoved in the car, none too gently. Am I right?” He leant away from your touch, brows furrowed and he stared back out at the hippos without answering. “Then you never meant to see Escobar. You were banking on the Cali cartel.”
“I got the Cali cartel’s cocaine,” he snapped. “I also got Escobar’s.”
You couldn’t keep the smirk out of your voice, so you didn’t try to hide it. “Unintentionally.”
His glare was sharp as he turned away from you, heading back inside. “They like me in there more than you do.”
“No no no,” you laughed, reaching for his wrist gently. You didn’t pull it, only held it, and although he jerked as if to pull away, he didn’t. He turned towards you slowly, a warning glint to his eye, but you remained unintimidated. “Ilike you, Felix. You’re the only one in this entire place who’s worth his word - that’s why you don’t belong here.”
He scoffed, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and placing one between his lips. “And I suppose you don’t either.”
“Correct. I don’t.”
He laughed, hand rummaging in his pocket for a lighter that clearly wasn’t there. You clicked your tongue at his attitude, pulling your own lighter from the front of your dress. You met his eye as you raised the lighter to the tip of his cigarette, the flame catching in the deep, gentle brown of his eyes. He wasn’t the type of man you were used to.
You held the flame to ignite the tobacco, and his hands raised to steady your wrists until it caught. But you kept the closeness, your voice a whisper. “Take me to Mexico with you.”
Imagine finding out that your boyfriend Deny is La Quica from the Medellin cartel.
requested by: anon warnings: ?? swearing ?? this ones pretty tame for a narcos one imo also, i kinda gave it an underlying possible javi x reader vibe because my love is just too strong, hope that’s chill.
You threw your coat over the back of a chair and swept up a coffee from the desk. Two glugs of it assaulting your tastebuds and you knew it wasn’t yours.
“Hey, don’t pull that face. This is good stuff, your taste is off.” Javi swiped it from your hand and held out another for you, and you took a sip.
“No no, my taste is brilliant - this is good stuff.”
He scoffed, “You wanna talk about your taste in men again?”
Your brows set with his teasing tone. You knew what he was getting at - he wanted you to spill the gossip on your latest boyfriend so he could terrorise him, like he always does. “Um, no. I’m not having you chase off another perfectly good man.”
“Why did they dart on you if they were perfectly good, sweetie?”
You frowned at him and his shit-eating grin. You had nothing to say to that. You loved Javi, you really did, but he and his cynicism were a detrimental force on your lovelife. At this rate, you’d be 50 years old and still sat in a bar every other night with these two assholes.
“Can’t help it if every guy in Colombia is a loser.”
He opened his arms, “I’m in Colombia.”
“And so my point stands.” You shook your head and took a slurp of coffee, turning your back on him and going to stand beside a focused Steve staring at a wall, hands on his hips.
Your brows raised when you followed his gaze. “Oh, this is new.”
Faces and faces. So many faces dotted the board, with names tacked up, many of which you recognised, some crossed through with red. At the top, one Pablo Escobar. “So this is our cartel.”
“This is our cartel, but only as far as we know.” Steve gestured to the lowest row on the board, many of which were names without pictures. “We don’t know these guys. And we don’t know who they got working for them, either.”
“It’s a huge fuckin’ spider’s web,” called Javi from behind you.
“Anything we do to anyone on this web, the spider will know,” you nodded grimly. Your eyes raked through the profiles, some strangers and some familiar. One, just a little too familiar.
Your brows creased, your feet instinctively took a step closer. You craned your neck to see a little better and your heart lurched when you saw what you wished wasn’t true. His name escaped your lips in a gasp. “Deny?”
“What’s that?” Steve asked.
“Oh, what? Nothing, just-”
“Just?”
“I think it’s too early for my eyes,” you laughed and waved a hand dismissively, then raising your coffee. “Gonna need a little more of this.”
Steve’s eyes narrowed and constricted your stomach with nerves. But he nodded with a “Uh huh,” and went to shuffle through some papers. “What’s our next move, then?”
“Fill in the blanks? We need a full board to get the full web.” You scoured the rest of the board for anyone else you recognised, but there were no others. Just your boyfriend.
Your eyes settled on the picture of him, trying to tell yourself that anyone could have his curly hair, his scruff. Even the wildness in his eyes wasn’t hard to come by these days.
But then, you filled your brain with the faces of sicarios. It would make sense that he had that look too. Fuck, it suddenly made too much sense. His sneaking, his reluctance to be seen with you, how he never told you about his friends or family, or even work.
Your fingers found their way to the necklace he’d bought you, a dainty gold chain.
How could he be part of this? Your sweet, hilarious, ride-or-die Deny.
But then, you had to assume he had no idea you were with the DEA.
You’d been playing a more dangerous game than you knew, and now it was time to win.
