Chapter Text
Jesse had never been more terrified in his life.
“Relax, man,” Emilio told him. “Domingo’s my cousin. It’ll be fine.”
“That’s what you said last time, bitch,” Jesse hissed. “Right before he beat the shit out of me.”
“This is different, yo,” Emilio insisted. “We didn’t do nothing wrong.”
“Save it, both of you,” Domingo ordered. “My boss is on his way. You’ll be lucky if you make it out of this with just a beating.” He looked pissed off, and maybe a little nervous. He was ten years older than Emilio and Jesse, and anyone that scared him was not someone Jesse wanted to meet.
An absolutely gorgeous red muscle car pulled up outside the house. The man who got out of it looked like the kind of gangster Jesse only dreamed of being. He was nearly bald, his hair shaved close to his head. He wore a red shirt under a black leather jacket, unbuttoned enough that Jesse could see the gold chain around his neck. His boots looked like alligator skin, and Jesse could tell with just one look that a kick in the ribs from them would leave bruises that would last. A single earring glinted in his left ear, and when he passed Emilio and Jesse to stand by Domingo, the outline of a gun was visible in his waistband.
Jesse wondered if he was going to die today, before he even made it to twenty. He never should have let Emilio talk him into working for his cousin with connections to the goddamn cartel. He should have learned his lesson the first time Domingo pulverized him for losing a week’s supply running from the cops. He never should have let Emilio talk him into this.
The man looked around, blank-faced and giving away nothing. “They cook in here?”
His voice was surprisingly soft. Jesse thought it was probably because he never needed to raise it. No one in their right mind would fuck with this guy.
“Yeah,” Domingo confirmed. “It can’t be much, not with this equipment. And they say they’re not selling it.”
“We’re not, I swear!” Jesse knew he should probably keep his mouth shut, but he’s never been good at that. “It’s just for us, we’re not selling anything on the side.”
The man stared them down. His expression was cold, not like ice but like a stone wall. Domingo looked at him nervously. Even Emilio was breathing a little faster, and he was never scared of anything.
"Nacho, c'mon," Emilio said, "you know I'd never—"
The man—Nacho—held up a hand to silence him. “I asked around, talked to some skells,” he said. “Seems like all the product going out is ours.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s right,” Jesse said, nodding quickly. “We ain’t trying to rip anybody off, yo.”
He could practically see Nacho hold back an eye roll. He looked back at Domingo. “I don’t give a shit what your guys do on their own time,” he said, and Domingo visibly relaxed.
He stepped forward, dark brown eyes flicking between Emilio and Jesse.
He was taller than Jesse, shorter than Emilio. But he had a presence, and not even Jesse’s insane best friend could hold up to the way he stared into their souls.
“If you want to cook your own glass to smoke yourselves, I don’t care,” he said. “But if I hear you’ve been selling what you make here… whether that’s instead of, or in addition to the product we give you…”
He leaned in close and lowered his voice further. Jesse had never heard someone put so much threat into so soft a tone. “It’s going to be bad for you. Understand?”
Jesse nodded vigorously, and out of the corner of his eye he could see Emilio doing the same. “Yeah, man, right on.”
Nacho glanced back at Domingo, and then left without another word.
Jesse let out a relieved breath. His knees felt like jelly. He had just stared Death in the face and somehow made it out unscathed.
Nacho definitely remembered dying.
He remembered holding a gun to Bolsa’s head, knowing that even if he pulled the trigger, he would be gunned down in an instant.
He hadn’t wanted to give those assholes the satisfaction of shooting him. He did it himself.
He thought he might remember being dead. There was definitely a sense that time had passed. But… his death had been quick. There was no light at the end of a tunnel; his life hadn’t flashed before his eyes. He had pulled the trigger, and then he was gone. He hadn’t even had time to register the sound of the gunshot.
But when he finally managed to claw his way out of the dirt that covered him, he was alone. No Salamancas, no Fring and his goons, no Bolsa.
And there was a sense of… blackness, he supposed. Like when you wake up after sleeping; even when you can’t remember any dreams, your mind knows that time has passed.
It felt a little like that.
He wondered if this was the afterlife.
He’d stopped believing in God a long time ago. For a while, he’d still gone to Mass with his father, but it was just going through the motions. If there had ever been a God, Nacho thought, He had abandoned them long ago.
As for the Devil… he’d once thought Hector Salamanca must be evil incarnate. Then Gus Fring. Then Lalo.
He brought his hand to the side of his head, where the bullet should have entered. There was no wound. Just the fuzz of his hair and some dried blood from the beating Mike had given him before coming here. Even those wounds were gone.
He was wearing the same clothes he’d died in, though they were riddled with bullet holes and stained with what must be all the blood he had in his body. He was pretty sure this was the same place he’d died.
He must have been buried. Not very deeply, but he hadn’t expected to have a grave at all. Fring and the Salamancas would have left him to rot, to be picked apart by scavengers.
Had Mike buried him? He was the only person who had both seen Nacho die and gave even the slightest damn about him.
A small shrub grew where he had lay, partially uprooted from where he dug himself up. Desert bluebells. He reached down to run his fingers over the leaves and delicate petals.
He walked.
He walked until everything hurt. He didn’t have any water. It was cooler than it should have been in the desert in summer, but his skin still started to burn, and his lips cracked, and he remembered bleeding out not all that far from here from two very different gunshot wounds than the one that had killed him.
He had known, before he died, that he would go to Hell. He had just thought it would be a different Hell than the one he had lived in for so many years. Perhaps that had been foolish. He had always escaped one cage just to find himself in the same one again, dressed a little differently.
Eventually, he reached a road. And there he waited.
It felt like an eternity before a car came down the road. The guy rolled down the window, and Nacho nearly had a heart attack because for a split second he thought it was Lalo.
But it was just another man with a moustache and a gray streak in his black hair, and Nacho got his breathing under control as he got a better look and realized that they didn’t actually look all that similar.
“My car broke down,” was the excuse Nacho gave when the man asked if he was alright. “I would’ve called for a tow, but there’s no service out here.”
It was a shitty excuse, and given the state of him the guy clearly didn’t believe him, but he also didn’t ask any questions. Nacho appreciated that. He felt bad for taking the wad of cash in the guy’s jacket pocket.
He used it to buy a t-shirt at the gas station where the guy dropped him off. No one there asked questions either, and Nacho had roughed up enough people in this desert to know why.
He also bought a shower, and by the time he trashed his no-longer-white button-down he felt slightly less like shit. Still confused as hell, though.
Next order of business was food. He was reluctant to spend any more money when he still needed a taxi, but he was parched and starving to the point that gas station tacos actually sounded appealing.
“What day is it?” He asked the lady at the register.
She looked anywhere but at him. “November ninth.”
Nacho furrowed his brows. He died on May 31st. Had it really been months?
“Is there, uh,” He snapped his fingers as he saw a newspaper behind the register, and pointed at it with his eyebrows raised. “Can I?”
The cashier handed it to him. Her eyes were wide. “What, are you a time traveler or something?”
Nacho barely registered the attempt at humor. His attention was locked on the date printed on the paper.
November 9, 2008
It hadn’t been months. He’d been dead for more than four years.
His heart nearly stopped again when he read the headline: Drug Kingpin Tuco Salamanca Killed in Shootout With DEA Agent.
“Can I keep this?” His voice might have been a bit higher than usual.
“Uh, sure. Do you need me to call a taxi for you?”
“Yeah, thanks.” Nacho took his tacos and water bottle and left. He sat on a bench outside to eat and read the article in full.
It didn’t tell him much. Two of Tuco’s men had been found dead in a junkyard, which prompted the DEA to raid the cantina he was using as a headquarters. Tuco himself managed to avoid arrest, but the agent had tracked him down. Tuco had shot first, and the agent defended himself. Usually, Nacho would doubt that, but in Tuco’s case he had no trouble believing it.
A dead Tuco draws Salamancas like flies, Mike had once told him.
Assuming that this wasn’t the afterlife, and that he wasn’t trapped in some split-second-before-death hallucination, it had been roughly four and a half years since Nacho died. And now he was, presumably, not dead.
None of that made any sense, so he didn’t dwell on it.
He needed to check on his father. He needed to stay hidden, in case Fring still had eyes everywhere, and Nacho had to assume he did. He had no idea what Fring’s reaction would be to him showing up again, but he didn’t want to find out.
He had the taxi take him to a library, and found a quiet corner with a computer. He typed in A-Z Upholstery.
The shop had closed years ago, not long after Nacho’s death. When he searched for Manuel Varga, he found an obituary from December 2005.
He stared at it for a long time, unmoving.
Heart failure, it said.
His father was dead. His father was gone.
Why was he here? Everything he had done in the last year of his life was to protect his father, even if it destroyed their relationship in the process. If his father was gone, what was the point?
Gritting his teeth, he typed in Los Pollos Hermanos.
Many, many results. Photos of Fring smiling warmly at fundraisers, charity events, and grand openings of more of his restaurants.
A familiar rage flared in his gut. He didn’t know why he was here, if this was the afterlife or if he had somehow found his way back to the land of the living. But he would almost certainly have the element of surprise, and he had absolutely nothing to lose.
He was going to kill Gustavo Fring.
The first thing he did was visit a pawn shop. The gold chain that had started as a symbol of his success and slowly morphed into a shackle around his throat sold for a fair bit of cash, as did his watch, scuffed as they were from years in the dirt. He kept his snake earring. He’d sell it later if he really needed to, but he didn’t want to give it up just yet.
But it was enough, at least, to buy a beat-up old truck in a dark red similar to the van he used to drive before everything went to shit. It sputtered a dying wheeze as it started. He spared a moment to miss his Javelin, then got on the road.
Saul Goodman’s office looked like something out of a cartoon. It wouldn’t have been Nacho’s first choice, but he didn’t exactly have anywhere else to go, or anyone else to go to. He thought about trying to contact Mike, but… Mike worked for Fring. That had become all too clear in the last month. Or, what felt like the last month to him.
The woman at the front desk took his name with an expression that suggested she would rather be anywhere else. But it must have gotten to Saul quickly, because she waved him through, much to the annoyance of the others in the waiting room.
“Mister Varga! Long time no see!” The lawyer looked genuinely afraid when Nacho entered, though as usual he hid it behind bluster and nervous laughter. “I had no idea you were still, ah… To what do I owe the pleasure?”
He didn't bother with any preamble. “I need a place to lay low. And a way to make money.”
There was a beat where Nacho could see his hands tremble, and then Saul puffed up like a bird. “You think you can just show up after all these years and start making demands? Do you have any idea what Lalo put me through because of you?”
“I really don’t wanna hear about what Lalo put you through,” said Nacho. The man was dead now, anyway. Then again, supposedly so was he. “Look, I just…” He ran a hand over his scalp, looking around the gaudy office. “I need work. So if you have anything, I’m your guy.”
Saul’s expression was somewhere between exasperated and annoyed. “I… might have something. But not right now. So just give me a number I can call you at, and I’ll let you know, okay?”
Nacho just looked at him. “I don’t have a phone.”
“Jesus Christ, kid,” Saul muttered, and started rummaging through his desk. Nacho wanted to bristle, because there was no way the lawyer had more than a decade on him, but then there was a cell phone being thrown at his head.
He caught it. He needed a gun as well, but he wasn’t about to ask Saul for that. He rubbed his forehead. “Also, some information.”
He didn’t want to ask this. He was afraid of the answer. Anything could have happened in the years he was gone. “Domingo Molina.”
Saul looked at him expectantly. “What about him?”
“Where is he?”
“How should I know?” the lawyer crowed. “Last I heard from him was back in September when his cousin, another client of mine, was picked up by the feds. The cousin skipped bail, and I haven’t heard from either of them since. And if you’ve been gone as long as they have… One way or another, you’re not coming back.”
Nacho must have done something with his face, because Saul quickly stepped back, his hands raised in surrender. “But hey! That’s what I thought about you! So, y’know… anything’s possible, right?” He laughed nervously.
Nacho unclenched his fists and forced his breathing to slow. “Tell me where he lives.”
He got Domingo’s address on a sticky note and the number for an arms dealer he resolved to call when he had the money.
He forced himself to take a moment and think when he got back in his car. He couldn’t just go after Fring directly. He had to be smart about this. He’d been given a second chance, if only for revenge, and he didn’t want to waste it.
He wondered what Mike would do. The old man always questioned his plans, always had another angle for him to consider.
He would wait, Nacho decided. He would wait, and watch, and gather as much information as he could before he made his move.
Domingo’s house reminded Nacho a lot of his own, though it was mostly green instead of red. It was messy, and covered in a layer of dust that suggested no one had been there in a long time.
His clothes were in the closet. Most of them were new, but Nacho recognized a few things. His bathroom was stocked. There was a dog bed and several toys strewn around, but no dog. The backyard was overrun with weeds and wildflowers. Nacho caught a glimpse of desert bluebells, and had to force himself to look away.
It took him several tries to open the safe. When he finally tried a combination that worked—1209—he had to take several moments to compose himself. There was cash inside, a lot of it, as well as a notebook that contained what looked like notes regarding everything Domingo had told the DEA, strategically using his CI connection that Nacho had forced him into. He reported enough to satisfy the feds when they came knocking, but kept suspicion off of anything with an actual cartel connection.
His handwriting was neat and somewhat slanted, the same as it had been in high school when he helped Nacho pass math even though Nacho was a grade ahead of him.
The last thing in the notebook was how Domingo had been forced to rat out his own cousin to the DEA, though he had been hoping to get his cousin’s partner, instead.
You did this, the guilt in his chest whispered, curling around his spine like a serpent, squeezing the breath from his lungs. You brought him into the game, you moved him up in the ranks, you put him in this impossible position. And then you abandoned him to fend for himself.
Domingo followed Nacho everywhere when they were kids. Nacho would get them into the worst trouble, but he always got them out of it again, too. In school, Domingo had been shy and a little nerdy, but no one ever messed with him because they knew Nacho would beat the shit out of anyone who did.
Nacho thought about the way Domingo’s face had bruised beneath his fists, the way his ribs had cracked as Nacho’s boots collided with his stomach. He had never, ever looked at Nacho the same way again, even when Hector had his stroke and Nacho promised, Nothing like that will ever happen again.
It had been a lie, and they both knew it. They’d practically been strangers by the time Nacho died. And yet the combination to Domingo’s safe was still 1209—Nacho’s birthday.
He was dead. He should be dead.
He fell asleep in Domingo’s bed, half-expecting to never wake up.