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hausofmamadas · 6 months

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Pairing: Andrea Nuñez & OC!Julian "Bugsy" Barrón Corona

For @narcosfandomdiscordNarcOctober - Day 24 - Day of Monsters

Prompt: "The world isn’t made up of heroes and monsters. Just broken people balancing between the two.”

Word count: ≈ 3.2K

TWs: Canon-consistent violence, references to trauma/domestic abuse

There’s always the power of choice, insofar as you believe that you have one. The fucked part about it all was the system they were in was built to give most people the false impression that they didn’t have any. After the failed assassination attempt on her boss, Jesús Blancornelas, Andrea Nuñez meets with the little brother of the sicario who did the deed, Julian Barrón Corona aka Bugsy, to understand the man behind the monster.

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She’d always heard a few decades in an American prison left people looking much older than they were. The confinement, the stress, the lack of sun, the terrible food, the boundless future of the same old day-to-day nothing, for some, with no end in sight. Nothing to look forward to and no one to look up to. It wasn’t a life, but a cheap imitation, and after all, wasn’t that justice?

Andrea used to have an easy answer to that question: of course, it was. For a lot of these pinshe pendejos, mercy even. Justice was something she’d believed she had an innate understanding of. Even her father said so. Since she was five, he’d said so. That’s why he encouraged her to be a reporter. But at some point, the concept of justice and the truth became intertwined and simplified in a way that seemed comically obtuse now. You seek the truth and justice will follow. Justice always the destination; truth, the means. The most erroneous misconception of all: that one could not exist without the other.

But the news about Rebollo changed the game, and now, as she watches Julian Barrón Corona – heretofore known to her only by his gang alias, Bugsy – socks stuffed in his dress shoes, dress shoes in hand, walking through the sand on the beach until he reaches the front door of the café, she’s taken aback because he looks younger than his 33 years, even though he hadn’t been in the free world in over a decade, and then she realizes all that racket about truth and justice is a fairy tale. More fit for the panels of a comic book, than the pages of a newspaper. More fiction than nonfiction.

He hasn’t seen her yet, at one of the patio tables outside, and she doesn’t flag him down immediately, preferring to study him from afar instead. He’s seemingly preoccupied investigating, reading something on the front door. Perhaps trying to figure out if it was absolutely necessary to put his shoes back on. Through the tinted glass of the windows, he finally spots her on the patio, and doesn’t bother going inside, so as not to trouble himself with the shoes. There’s something of herself in that. She hates dress shoes. Glancing at her boots, wiggling her toes inside against the well-worn leather that stretches to accommodate them, yeah, she wouldn’t have wanted to put those foot prisons back on either.

And it all worked out since she hadn’t bothered to dress up for the funeral. Only because she didn’t know she was going until her foot hit the too-green, carefully manicured lawn that blanketed the hills of the cemetery. Her legs did the rest in spite of her – left, right, left, right – bringing her to the edge of the monochromatic crowd of mourners, in varying shades of black and gray. She could barely see the opening of the grave over the flowers piled atop the casket. She hadn’t a clue why she was there. She knew no one, and no one knew her.

The deceased she only knew by reputation, and had seen only twice in person. Once, when she snuck behind the police barrier to sit outside the cathedral and wait for unsuspecting Arellano/Vasquez wedding attendees to exit, spill a little chisme, maybe put her onto a new lead. He’d been standing on the side of the building, probably there to ferry the family to the car from the private entrance of the rectory, once the ceremony ended. Since she was not where she was supposed to be, she hid behind a corner, trying to draw as little attention to herself as possible and didn’t get a good look at him.

The second time was in her car, staking out the hipódromo with Isaac. She was so focused on Benjamín, she didn’t pay the guy at his side much mind, except to mentally note that he looked vaguely familiar. But after visiting Jesús at the hospital, when she went back to the office to write her story, she pulled out Isaac’s pictures again to get a better look. See what he was like not covered in blood, slumped over in the street, with a bullet in one eye. Popeye with one eye. However, tasteless it was, she found that detail darkly hilarious. Until she finally saw him in the pictures Isaac took. His face was expressionless to the point of unsettling, except for his eyes, inky black with an almost ascetic countenance and an unforeseen depth, heavy with the weight of his life and the whole world, bits and pieces that she could only speculate about and that would torture her curiosity forever.

Before that, she’d believed that she hated him. Even though Jesús walked away from that intersection with his life and this man didn’t, she was angry. Pissed. She hated him. Except she didn’t. No, in reality, all she hated was what he symbolized. And though, she condemned his actions, what he’d done, she was reckoning with the difference between deeds and intentions and how the two become misaligned when you’re part of a bigger system. There’s always the power of choice, insofar as you believe that you have one. The fucked part about it all was the system they were in was built to give most people the false impression that they didn’t have any. It wasn’t an excuse, but it was the universal explanation.

Over time, she'd come to understand that the reasons people do the things they do can be conflicted and strange, at times baffling and inexplicable. Sometimes they hadn’t thought about the reasons at all, just spent their entire lives reacting. The way she saw it, yes, actions are worthy of condemnation and should be the basis by which a person’s character is divined but her own estimations now required further analysis. That’s where the reasons and intentions come in. Not important in the formation of a person’s character, but crucial in her conception of them. She used to think that last part didn't matter. But then, she’d been wrong about a lot of things.

She doesn’t hate him. Because you can’t really hate someone you don’t know. And when you do know it’s still hard. If she’d learned anything in her career, time and time again, it shakes out this way: people are hard to hate up close.

So, why go to the funeral, if not to curse the man's grave? Seated across from Julian now, while he loosens the collar of his shirt, rolls the sleeves up to his elbows, then places them on the table, flipping through the menu like a magazine, that’s what she’s hoping to find out.

“Has pedido ya?” All she sees are a pair of inquiring eyes over the brim of the menu and it’s a sight so strange she almost laughs. But the eyes give her pause. Dark and filled with the mysteries of a life lived too fast and hard to make sense of. Just like his brother’s, only less so. A little freer somehow.

“O, no. Estaba esperándote. No voy a comer probablemente.”

“Ah,” Julian nods. “Pues, yo sí, porque comida en la carcél sabe a puta mierda, perdóname por decirlo.”

Andrea looks down, a tight smile on her face. He's disarming immediately. Polite, but with the trademark frankness of a kid moonlighting as a career criminal. The authenticity of criminals as a rule never ceased to surprise her, so accustomed she was to the dance of obfuscation, a never-ending cycle of Two Truths and a Lie played by political officials, businessmen, spokespersons, strategists, law enforcement, feds, the PJF, the PGR, Cisen, Disen, DEA, CIA, and on and on. Or the dance of silence from the narcos at the top, black-hat politicos themselves who’d finally amassed enough of something to lose by talking.

When truth was unattainable, she’d take silence over lies any day. But criminals, particularly low level ones, usually had little, if anything to lose. So honesty was usually attainable. To a point, anyway.

On the heels of that, it turns her gut with pity to realize Julian, who started off with little himself, now has nothing. Mother on hospice, both brothers dead, and set to go right back to Calipatria prison in the States. He only got out for the funeral. The last one he’ll attend maybe ever; a statement, in isolation, that sounds like a good thing, if you don't think about the fact that it’s only because no one’s around left to die.

The waiter comes around to take their order, and she opts for a latte to kill the caffeine headache brewing behind her eyes, her usual morning coffee but another casualty in her whiplash decision to go to the funeral. Julian orders black coffee and chocolate chip pancakes with a side of French fries instead of hash browns because though they’re both potato-based, he doesn’t like the texture of hash browns. Or at least, that’s the answer he gives when her brows furrow, questioning the distinction.

The menus are cleared, their coffees brought, and Andrea taps the rim of hers after taking a long sip, not sure how to begin.

Julian seems to pick up on this, “Mira,” and opens the conversation with an air of lending a hand, an unexpected desire to help that brings her relief, “voy a contestar a toda tus preguntas, porque me diste una excusa para quedarme aquí en Tijauna un poquito más. Así qué tómate tú mejor tiro.”

“Hmmm,” Andrea turns this over. That’s the best thing a reporter can hear, ‘I’m an open book.’ It rarely happens with any real transparency but this time it is. And of course, this time she has no idea what the fuck to ask. So, she starts off easy, “Prefieres que te llamo Julian o el alias de pandilla, Bugsy?”

“A mí, tampoco no importa. Prefieres que hablamos en espańol o inglés?”

Andrea responds in English, “I don’t mind either, either.”

Mid-sip, Julian chuckles into the edge of his mug, splashing a bit of coffee back onto his nose and cheeks. Mopping it up with a napkin on the table, he takes the opportunity to set things straight. “Bugsy’s not my gang name, by the way.”

“Qué?”

“No me lo dieron la pandilla. Fue un apodo de mi hermano, Matteo.”

Intrigued, Andrea’s eyebrows shoot up. A seemingly mundane detail, its significance betrayed only by the fact that he wanted to set the misconception straight in the first place. That, and the mention of the other Corona brother, Matteo. Who she knew a little bit about. Shot and killed by police more than fifteen years ago for allegedly breaking out of a mental health facility. Along with his obituary, she’d read the only two or three existing, very short news articles about the incident, nothing more than a paragraph in the dailies.

“Okay, Julian,” she goes with his given name. Because now she knows Bugsy’s a family name, it feels improper to use it, being a total stranger. Like she hasn’t earned it. “I don’t–” Unable to continue, she looks off to the side at the ocean lapping at the shore, trying to gather concoctions of words and images into some semblance of form and thought.

“It’s okay,” Julian shrugs. “I know who you are.”

Her head snaps back at attention. “Sorry?”

“I know you work at La Voz and that your boss is Jesús Blancornelas.”

Andrea leans back in her chair, massaging her temples, and looking up at the red and mint green stripes of the umbrella shading their table.

“Lo siento,” Julian offers, like he’s speaking to a stray cat he’s got cornered but is trying not to spook. “I didn’t mean that in any typa way. S’not a threat or nothing.”

The front two legs of her chair come down hard, shaking their table. He’s so earnest and she can’t figure out if she wants to punch him for it or cry. She can’t figure out fucking anything anymore. The only thing she can begin to ask to make some sense of any of the bullshit she’s been through in the last six months is, “Why. I just wanna know why.”

And like that, there they are. The words, out of her mouth, spilling onto the table now for both of them to deal with.

“Why David did it?”

David. So foreign. It was always his full name, David Barrón Corona, or just Barrón Corona. One of the Corona brothers. Sicario for the AFO. Not David. But instead of saying any of that, she just nods for him to continue.

“Well, I don’t know much. Everything we get– y’know on the inside, is piecemeal. But last I talked to him, I know things were going in a direction he didn’t like, y’know. Bystanders, priests,” he motioned with an open hand at her across the table, “journalists, people not in the game. Just wasn’t down for all that, chu’know. That ain't how we came up.”

His English is accented with that Chicano lilt she’s heard in movies and she wonders if his brothers sounded the same. Again with the mundane details, but she needs them. She’s using them. He scratches the corner of his mouth, waiting patiently for her to take her turn in the conversational volley, but she’s too busy deconstructing monsters in her head with mundane details. Harder to hate up close.

So, after another sip of his coffee, he continues, “Y’know where we come up,” he shrugs, looking behind him as if where he came up is right behind him, and in a way it is, “where we come up, options are hard to see your way to when all you’re trying to do is catch your breath. Our dad–” Pausing to look at the ocean, Julian crosses his arms and clears his throat. Dad is clearly a sticky subject. “Our dad tried to prepare us for the world, in his way. My brothers got it worse than me but I saw enough. And as we got older, everyone around us was turning to the clickas, pandillas como las llamas aquí. Y’know most’d tell you it was to make a buck but it was prolly more to belong.”

Andrea seizes that. “Is that why you guys did?”

Caught in a memory, Julian smiles wryly, “Well, Matteo? Matteo didn’t really belong anywhere, even where he did. But I guess in his own way, yeah. To belong but also as a means to an end. 'Cause we wouldn’t have got the old man out the house without the Red Steps.” He takes a sip of his coffee, like that’s that.

She has the urge to poke holes in that declaration, but something stops her. What he said about options. Choices. How they’re hard to see when you’re just trying to catch your breath. So, instead of arguing, she follows his lead, getting caught up in a memory that’s not hers and doesn't need to be. “So … Matteo was the first domino to fall?”

“Correcto. Y despues de eso, David se une a Matteo, eso fue todo. But the thing is, and,” he shrugs, “this might disappoint you,” looking at her with a sorrow that might look like pity if he had an ounce of condescension in his body, before he breaks the news gently. “It wasn’t a tragedy. For them, for any of us. 'Cause guess what never happened after that? No one surprised us in the middle of the night with military drills, no one got drunk and pushed us into crowded streets with traffic, claiming it was ‘a test’ to see if we’d flinch 'cause, ‘only pussies flinch and get fucked over by life.’ No one yelled at me to finish my peas till I puked at the dinner table. Shoplifting travel bottles of Yukon Jack when the punishment was six months in YA if we got caught. White-knuckling it in the passenger’s seat, drunk driving ninety miles an hour on the 101 freeway at three in the morning. All that? Over.”

Now Andrea's looking down at the table, itemizing that harrowing list in her head that’s left Julian nearly breathless. Hearing it out loud, one after another, she can’t help but feel for him. For them, their family. But just as she’s about to give way to too much compassion, the fire in her chest erupts, back to a roar, thinking of all the kids on the streets of Tijuana with no fathers. Fathers taken from them too soon. Like Jesús almost was. Like her own was. More fathers than she could keep track of. There were estimates, people tried keeping track, but those were just numbers. Too far away from what mattered.

It’s like he can see the fury building in her right there but if he can't, he addresses it. “I’m not saying it was the right thing– fuck, I’m not even saying it was the only thing to do. There were a lotta options. But no one told us. So, we were never keeping track. Now? In prison? I got nothing but time to keep track. I know exactly what me, Matty, David could’ve done different. But I can’t change what we did. Just try to remember that choice is the only control I have.” He laughs but it doesn’t reach his eyes, “And you best believe that’s a near impossible task where I’m at,” the first sign of bitterness he’s exhibited this whole time but it’s gone as fast as it comes. “But in a lotta ways, prison took away the noise real early for me. The distractions. The expectations of others, of life. What a man’s s’posed to be, s’posed to do. I can’t think in ‘supposed to’ anymore, only what is, what I can do with that. If anything.”

He stops mid-thought, exhaling energetically and Andrea gets the impression that this is the most he’s said out loud in a long time. To anyone. Or maybe it’s just a heavy topic and a long day and he’s tired. She doesn’t know this kid that well, Julian. But she has to give it to him. He knows how to close. She purses her lips, digesting what he’s said, deciding to match his transparency with her own.

“Well, Julian. I hear a lot of bullshit in my line of work. And I wasn’t certain what I’d find here, but of course, you have to understand I always prepare myself for that inevitability.” He chuckles at that and the muscles in her temples soften, eyes cast down to look at her hands, as she picks her cuticles nervously. “But you've laid out your truth, so I’ll lay out mine. I came here ready for it. Ready to hate him. Wanting it even. I’d hate you if you’d given me the slightest justification. I came here expecting all the things I’d read and heard to be confirmed, that the monsters I’d made in my head were real because it’s so much easier–” she trails off. Easier to what?

She doesn’t know, all she knows is, "it’s easier to–” she huffs, frustrated. Where are the words? Why can't she find the right ones? Oh, fuck it. “Eas– ugh, because it’s just fucking easier. And all I want is for this to be easy because everything else is hard. But you met me with nothing but you and the truth. And all I feel is guilty that I can’t hate either of you.” She throws her hands up in defeat, letting them land on the table. The contact rattles the table and their cups. “But I can’t. I can't, I can't. Because the more I learn, the more it becomes clear that nothing is simple. And that the world isn’t made up of heroes and monsters. Just broken people balancing between the two.”

He laughs, “Yeah, well,” like none of that surprises him. Although given everything he’d been through, there were probably precious few things that surprised him. He surprises her though with what he does next, less because it happens and more because he didn’t lose a tooth to her fist for doing it. “My mother used to tell us the only certain thing is absurdity and uncertainty,” he says, reaching across the table for one of her hands, then bringing it on the table to hold in both of his, dark eyes pleading with her own. “And the best way to deal with it is to say the things out loud. Call it what the fuck it is.”

An honest-to-goodness, real and genuine smile smile breaks out across Andrea's face and deepens as she’s filled with relief that she’s still capable of forming one, the still in working order. She was scared the mechanism might’ve been broken forever. Squeezing his hand like she can telegraph gratitude through her fingertips, she gives a nod, “Thanks.”

He beams back at her like the sun.

About to let go of his hand, she remembers what she’d thought about earlier – how he started off with little and has nothing to lose because he has nothing now – and grips it tighter still, “Hey, Bugsy,” drawing a puzzled look from him. “About your brother. I’m j– I’m so sorry.”

“For what?”

“Just ... for everything.”

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taglist: @narcosfandomdiscord, @narcolini, @ashlingnarcos, @drabbles-mc, @artemiseamoon

#narcoctober #i'm soooooobaaaaaaaaaaaad at this!!!!!!#but this idea came to me at the eleventh hour and i had to fucking run with it and imstillsorryforeverythinga;sldkjfa;lskdfj #andrea nuñez #andrea nuñez & male OC #narcos mexico #day 24 #day of monsters #netflix narcos mexico #david barrón corona #julian “bugsy” barrón corona

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