[Coco] Breaking Point

pengychan:

Being beaten up by the nearly forgotten and then dragged up there for Héctor to show off how insufferably merciful he was in front of a crowd was bad; being taken to recover into what had been his mansion felt like a fistful of salt rubbed into the wound.

[Héctor suspected he might have just reached a breaking point.]

A/N: Here’s something I began working on… forever ago, and only finished it now because it kept getting longer and longer. But hey, here it is.
Set after Down to Dust. 

***

Héctor should have known the very pleasant evening catching up with his Shantytown family – not that they lived there anymore, but the name had stuck – was about to take a bad turn when he heard people approaching. Six or seven or them, shouting and jeering and calling out his name. Which had sounded like fun, until he’d turned.

They were half-pushing, half-dragging what looked like a sack of bones; he had hardly enough time to blink before said sack was thrown on the floor in front of him. It took a moment for him to realize he was looking at a dark coat rather than a sack, that the bunch of bones was actually a full skeleton with a few bones broken and badly rearranged… and that the face peering up at him, a look of pure terror on his features, was one he knew too well.

“Cousin Héctor! Look who we found!”

“Not looking so good now, eh, hijo de puta?”

“I say we should throw him in the sinkhole!”

“Taught him a lesson, we did!”

A lesson in pain, sure enough: even from his huddled position on the floor it was easy to see that Ernesto’s right arm was broken and so were a few of his ribs, if the way he held onto his ribcage was anything to go by. There was a crack across his jaw as well, and the injury kept him from closing his mouth properly, allowing Héctor to spot a gap where one of his lower teeth must have been knocked loose by the blow.

Now we match, he thought, and it could have been funny in the right context. That was not the right context.

“Ah,” he found himself saying, unable to tear his gaze away from Ernesto’s terrified expression, the tenseness in his frame as he braced for more blows. “You… shouldn’t have.”

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