Hung Up
New
My accidental obsession for the past few months has been the film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), Sergio Leone's famous spaghetti Western about three men on the hunt for buried gold during the American Civil War, which is great and fun and I highly recommend it (you can find the whole thing on YouTube, with subtitles and everything, just by searching for the title). In the film, Clint Eastwood's nameless character, 'Blondie', also known as "The Good" of the title, is very quiet and enigmatic and we get very little insight into what he is thinking beyond his onscreen actions. This is my take on what is going on in his head. (In other words, it's a retelling of select scenes from the film from his point of view, with the aim of illuminating the progression of his character arc.)
This fic will probably make sense if you've seen the film and remember the general gist of what happens in it. If you have not, it does brush over significant sections of the plot, so there may be points of confusion regarding what's going on in the background and you may miss some things being alluded to, but the character progression hopefully still makes sense, so I won't stop you attempting to read it if you haven't. (That said, again, you can find the whole thing on YouTube for free, it's the #10 film on IMDb's top 250 films of all time list, and if you watch the film there are a million and one references in other things that you will get, including the excellent soundtrack by Ennio Morricone which you have definitely heard at least two tracks from even if you didn't know where they were from. You know that one piece of music that's the stereotypical Western music? It's the main theme of this film.)
If you enjoy this fic, you may also enjoy my ridiculous 36k words of meta-rambling about this film and everything in it (the meta sort of spoils the fic, though, so if you'd like to read both, it probably makes sense to do the fic first).
When you shoot at the rope, it grazes it but doesn’t sever it. For a couple of seconds, Tuco dangles from the noose like a sack of potatoes, a choked scream squeezing from his constricting throat. The next shot gets him down.
You didn’t mean to miss. You had told Tuco that reducing your cut might interfere with your aim, but that was why he’d dropped it and you’d stuck with fifty-fifty. You’d had a fleeting thought of scaring him a little, just to warn him about bringing up percentages again, but nah. That shot was meant to be it. Wind? The movement of the horse? Just a moment of carelessness?
It doesn’t matter. Tuco’s down now, and that’s the end of it. You shoot off some hats for good measure, and the two of you ride out of town.
——
“What are you trying to say? Anybody can miss a shot? Nobody misses when I’m at the end of the rope!”
You’re used to Tuco’s rambling bluster and over-the-top played-up insults, but the current flavor grates on your nerves more than usual. The fury in Tuco’s voice is genuine, the rope that almost killed him still hanging around his neck, and he will not stop talking, will not let it go, even when you’ve already told him the one thing you have to say about it.
“You’ve never had a rope around your neck,” Tuco rants on behind you. “Well, I’m going to tell you something. When that rope starts to pull tight, you can feel the devil bite your ass!”
You pull your horse to a stop, an unpleasant taste in your mouth. No, you’ve never had a rope around your neck, and you don’t plan to. You don’t have to listen to this. You don’t need this. What’s Tuco? Nothing. Some two-bit criminal runt. You can find another two-bit criminal, easy. One who spends less time complaining to the guy who saved his life and got him a thousand dollars for the trouble. Maybe even one who’s worth more than Tuco’s trumped-up three thousand.
“Yeah, you’re right,” you say, pulling Tuco down from your horse. “It’s getting tougher.”
He’ll probably make it back to town. Or not. Either way, you’ll be far away, and whatever happens to Tuco will no longer be your problem.
——
You weren’t expecting to ever see Tuco again. But now he’s here, sitting inside the window, pointing a gun at you. And meanwhile, you’ve just stupidly fired your final bullet at a guy who was probably seconds from collapsing anyway.
(They were in cahoots, clearly. Distract you with a sudden attack from the door and then get the jump on you from the other side. Tuco’s smarter than you gave him credit for – not that that’s saying much.)
On the other hand, Tuco had a clean shot at point-blank range, and instead he chose to announce himself and tell you to disarm.
Your pistol’s empty, but you take off your belt anyway. When a guy’s got a gun pointed at you, and yours isn’t loaded, you do what he says. You figure Tuco wants to talk, to gloat about his victory, to demand his half of the bounty or all of it, to try to strong-arm you into reestablishing your partnership. You figure one way or another he must be planning to lower the gun, given he hasn’t shot you yet.
You at least figure, once he’s grimly cocked his gun at you, that if you point out the storm is probably cannon fire he’ll see this isn’t the time for his nonsense and you should both get the hell out of this place before it gets any closer.
Instead, Tuco throws a rope at you.
“Throw it over the roof beam.”
Slowly, you unfurl the rope, the large noose at the end of it. If Tuco just wanted to kill you, he could have shot you already. But no, this is all some strange, sick game about You’ve never had a rope around your neck, isn’t it. You sent him to the noose, twice, and now he wants you to know how it feels.
Tuco’s gun is still on you. The rope is thick and coarse in your hands. You throw it.
“Now get on that.” He indicates the stool by the bed before pointing the gun back squarely at your chest.
You hook your foot around the legs of the stool, dragging it in front of you. It’s a small stool; it hardly gives any height. Your hands are free. He hasn’t thought this out very well. The problem is the gun.
“That’s right.” As you step onto the stool, Tuco’s eyes are steady, fixed on you with grim satisfaction. “Now make sure the rope is tight. It’s got to hold the weight of a pig.”
Slowly, you take the noose and thread it through the loop, then pull it down, yanking on it. The rope holds firm.
If Tuco’s doing this, really doing this, then you’re going to have to slip out of the noose when he’s distracted. It’s wide, much wider than it has to be. You could yank your head back and be out. Grab the rope before it tightens. Easy. But then there’s the gun. Any sudden movement and odds are you’re dead anyway. If he came closer, maybe – but why would he? He could just stand there and give you five seconds to jump before he shoots. What then?
Tuco glares up at you, gaze deadly firm. He hasn’t moved, hasn’t taken his eyes off you. “Now put the rope around your neck.”
You pull the noose apart and carefully push your head through it. The rope hangs loose, not even touching your skin, but your throat is tightening anyway, squeezed by phantom fibers.
“That’s very good!” says Tuco cheerfully. “It’s too big for your neck, huh? We fix that right away. I have another system, a little different than yours.” He grins a wicked little grin. “I don’t shoot the rope. I shoot the legs off the stool.”
The stool. You tense, muscles coiled to react. You’ll have to slip out of the noose the same moment he shoots, keep your balance, land on your feet. And then… rush him? Lunge towards him, try to wrestle the gun out of his hands before he can fire again? Risky, risky, as likely to end with you shot and bleeding on the floor.
For a second, Tuco looks oddly hesitant, staring up at you. You stare back, blood pounding in your ears. Cross the room, zigzagging to throw him off? Or is straight across better, quicker?
He tilts the gun down. “Adiós.”
Slip out of the noose when he shoots, keep your balance, and then—
And then a cannonball bursts through the wall, and the floor falls out from underneath him in a spray of wood and splinters. For a moment you blink at your luck; then you duck your head out of the noose, snatch your pistol belt off what remains of the floor, and sprint out to your horse, before the dust can settle.
On a gallop out of town, your racing pulse slowly calms back to normal, but the tingling itch around your neck lingers.
You’ve had your brushes with death before, times you survived by being faster on the draw. But those moments usually go by very quickly; this was the first time you’ve had quite this long to think about it. You’d like it to be the last.
——
It wasn’t hard to find another two-bit criminal; they’re a dime a dozen out here. As the sheriff reads out Shorty Larson’s criminal history, you aim your rifle. No wind. The horse is still. Careful, careful.
Only then a gun clicks right next to your face.
Seeing Tuco isn’t exactly a surprise anymore, though you don’t know how the hell he tracked you down. The fact he must be here for revenge once again registers abstractly, filed away. You already know that by the time you could swing your rifle around to point it anywhere in his direction, he would have already put a bullet through your skull. Somehow the first words that float through your head are, “And Shorty?”
Tuco looks towards the hanging, for just a moment. “No.”
“No?”
Tuco shakes his head. That’s it, you suppose. Again, when a guy has a gun pointed at you, you do what he says if you want to live. You can’t quite look away from Shorty, oblivious, waiting for a saving shot that won’t come.
The whip strikes, the horse bolts, and a man who trusted you chokes and dies, legs spasming feebly in the air before he goes still.
“Sorry, Shorty,” you mutter. Tuco takes your rifle and tells you to get up. Your gaze lingers on the swinging body as you rise to your feet, a familiar phantom itch snaking its way around your throat.
——
At first you think Tuco’s taking you somewhere, but once he casually shoots the canteen out of your hands and the hat off your head, you can see where this is going.
Tuco stays merrily out of reach on his horse, with all three guns, all smiles.
At first it all seems very abstract, just walking. You idly imagine how mad Tuco will be if you make it those one hundred miles. But it doesn’t take long before you know deep in your gut that that’s not happening. The heat is suffocating, your tongue dried into a slab glued to the roof of your mouth, your skin burning and itching and flaking and peeling, sweat stinging where it seeps into the open sores underneath. Your legs have gone numb, dragging unsteadily through the sand as you will them to lift. You’re not sure exactly how far you’ve gone, but it’s nowhere close, and already you’re pretty sure this is what Hell feels like.
Maybe it was a bastard move to leave Tuco in the desert.
It’s hard to feel sorry about it now, though, when Tuco is a constant, taunting presence, grinning as he takes indulgent gulps of water right in front of you, cackling with glee every time you stumble, ordering you onward if you stop walking for more than a couple of seconds — always far enough away you’d never make it close before he’d shoot.
In the end, your legs stop listening entirely. You tell them to keep walking, nothing happens at all, and then you’re on your knees and then lying face-down, scorching sand digging into your sunburnt face. You try to lift your head but you can’t, eyelids swollen and shut. Your body wants you to just lie there and sleep. It’s tempting. It’s not like you could keep walking even if you tried.
Tuco’s laugh sounds somewhere above you. Then the soft thunk of a foot stepping into the sand, very close by.
You fight through the haze of exhaustion to tear your eyes open, vision double and unfocused and swimming. All you can process is that Tuco’s boot is there, right by your face. Within reach.
You may not be able to move your legs, but you think you could move your hands. With clenched teeth, you call on every last scrap of energy left in your body and grasp for the boot: pull it, trip him before he can draw, and then maybe, maybe you can get his gun before he—
The boot is empty, folding between your clutching fingers. Ahead, somewhere out of reach, there’s a splash. Tuco’s laughing again. You drag your head upwards and find him bathing his feet in a large wooden tub, pouring water over his toes.
You let go of the useless boot, head slumping. And yet. You can’t quite tear your mind away from that mesmerizing sound of splashing water, your parched throat raw and aching. You look back over at the tub and hate yourself for it.
Between the thirst and the exhaustion, though, the revulsion refuses to stick, and somewhere in the back of your mind is the creeping awareness that if you go too much longer without water, you won’t live to enjoy your dignity anyway. When you drag yourself towards the tub, Tuco notices immediately with unbridled glee, pushing it towards you in invitation.
“You want some water?” He sticks his foot back in it, just to taunt you. “Drink. Drink! Come on, come on!”
And you don’t care anymore. Maybe, just maybe, the sheer rock-bottom humiliation of this will be entertaining enough to him that he’ll actually let you have it.
Instead, the moment you have your fingers on the edge of the tub and start lifting your head, Tuco upends it, the water sinking uselessly into the sand.
Fueled by a last heaving rush of spite, you manage to pull yourself up onto all fours. There’s some fantasy in your head about rushing him when he doesn’t expect it, seeing his eyes widen, wrestling the gun from him. But Tuco hasn’t so much as bothered to have his gun ready even as you were rising, just sits there casually pulling his boots back on. He’s so close, and yet you couldn’t manage more than a pathetic four-legged stumble in his direction right now, and Tuco knows it.
You look at him for a moment before deciding you’re not giving him the satisfaction of the attempt. You’ll just keep going, crawl the rest of his hundred miles or die doing it. If you’re going to die, maybe you can at least do it a little farther away from that inescapable taunting laugh.
You don’t make it very far, rolling pathetically down a hill and then just collapsing. When Tuco catches up, in no hurry, he finally just points his gun at you, sensing this is all he’s getting out of you. You don’t have the energy to do anything about it.
You swallow the dry, sticky copper taste in your mouth and hope it’s quick.
Again, Tuco hesitates longer than he needs to. And that’s when you hear hooves in the distance.
——
When you drag yourself towards the runaway wagon on the feeble scrap of strength you’ve recovered, you’re mostly figuring maybe, somehow, you can get the jump on Tuco while he’s distracted looting it. You end up making it there only when Tuco’s running back to his horse. But instead, you manage to shakily prop yourself up against the back of the wagon to see who it is he’s fetching water for, and the eye-patched rebel soldier hanging out of it chokes out something about gold buried in a grave marked “Unknown”, beside an Arch Stanton, before going limp.
When Tuco returns in a rage and threatens to kill you, you tell him then he’ll always be poor. It’s a bluff, really: you don’t know where the hell this supposed grave is, couldn’t make out whatever the guy said to Tuco before he went to get the water, and if this is truly all you’ve got, you couldn’t find it any more than he could. But the look on his face when you mention a name on a grave says everything. Tuco wants this money more than anything, and now you’re his only way to get it. The man who’s been hunting you down to torture and kill you now has every reason to do whatever it takes to keep you alive.
And with that final moment of triumph, a strange, blissful calm comes over you. The raw survival instinct that’s somehow kept you going through all of this finally loosens its clawing grip on your feverish mind and lets it succumb to exhaustion. As your consciousness dissolves into a comfortable haze, you smirk with the faint beginnings of a victorious chuckle.
Somewhere in the distance, Tuco begs you not to die and babbles that he’s your friend. You’d better be, you rat! you think as you drift away.
——
Now that he’s harmless, forced to help you by his own greed, Tuco has come to seem more amusing than anything else. The absurd, ridiculous monologue standing over your bed, an incoherent series of frantic, desperate, nakedly contradictory efforts to convince you to tell him the name. The naïve, excited way he actually leans in close when you beckon, as if you’re really going to tell him and not throw coffee in his face. The way that he will fetch you anything you ask for, grumbling insults all the while, only to instantly swap to fawning hymns about how much you mean to him whenever the monks are around.
You told him you’d sleep better with your good friend by your side to protect you just to rub in that you know exactly how much leverage you’ve got, but curiously, you find that you actually do. Normally, you sleep very lightly, hand on your gun, snapping to alertness at any unusual noise. It’s probably mostly the exhaustion and the damage your body’s healing off. But it doesn’t hurt to know that any would-be assassin would have to contend with this insane little rat-bandit and the dollar signs in his eyes before they could get to you.
Tuco unnecessarily explained to you the morning after you arrived, like a trump card, that without him, you can’t find the gold either. You spelled out the natural conclusion that neither of you finds the gold unless you both go together. Tuco doesn’t like it, but the gold trumps everything else for him.
You’d be content without the gold. You’ve gotten by this long on claiming bounties and shooting ropes. But there’s a plan forming in your head, has been since you got here. You’ll play the long game; you’ll come with him; you’ll let him take you to the graveyard with the unknown grave. And then, before his own inevitable betrayal, you’ll make him put his head into a noose. Make him watch helplessly as you snatch his precious money away, like a drink of water disappearing into the desert sand.
That final victory will be worth more than the money. And then you can forget about all this – about the shot that missed, about the walk through the desert, about the texture of the rope and the peeling itch in your skin. You’ll have your own sweet revenge, you’ll ride off into the sunset, and you’ll never see him again.
——
When Tuco goes to meet with a “Father Ramirez”, the day you’re about to head off, you’re curious – curious, because Father Ramirez is obviously related to Tuco Ramirez, and because any further leverage or insight could be useful later.
What you find when you discreetly peek in at their meeting is two estranged brothers bitterly coming to blows. What Tuco tells you as you set off in the wagon afterwards, abrupt forced cheer breaking through his obvious sour mood, is that they just had soup together, that his brother’s in charge of everything and what a nice guy he is, that he begged Tuco to stay longer.
You can’t help turning your head, the corners of your lips tugging upward. The lie is egregious and completely without purpose, in obvious, naked contradiction with the previous lie he told you about having no family. And in order to tell it to you, he’s talking to you like a friend again, with no one else even watching. You wonder if he has even noticed the incongruity, if he ever so much as keeps track.
No, this is just who Tuco is. As he licks his wounds, he imagines the meeting he’d rather have had and makes it real by telling you about it. Pretends you’re friends because he needs one. Tells you he had a hearty meal to persuade his own empty stomach. His most adamant lies, you’ve begun to suspect, are to himself.
You give a wry smile. “Sure.” You consider making some remark to suggest you saw everything, watching his face contort with flustered rage, reveling once again in the fact he won’t touch you so long as you know the name on that grave. But some tug of pity compels you not to. Tuco could have just told you his brother’s a worthless bastard; instead, he talked him up, created this fragile, better world for himself, and then was desperate enough to choose to entrust you with it.
“Well,” you say instead, “after a meal there’s nothing like a good cigar.”
You hold your cigar out without looking at him. Earlier, before he went to see his brother, you casually offered him your cigar in response to his harmless insults; he dropped it on the monastery floor and put it out with his foot. This time, he takes it, gives you a wary look, and then puts it in his mouth, giving it a puff.
It does cheer him up. It’s not long before he’s put on a somewhat desperate grin, and eventually he gets to making small talk, in more comfortably cheerful, friendly tones, as if he’d never felt anything else toward you. It’s transparent, but you’ll take it.
——
The war is getting harder to ignore. You pass piles of dead men sprawled on the ground as you travel deeper into contested territory. Tuco won’t tell you precisely where you’re headed – not that you can blame him, exactly.
It sets your nerves on edge: you want nothing to do with the war. Getting caught up anywhere close to it is a recipe for getting yourself killed, and you’ve already been one stroke of pure luck away from being blown to smithereens by a cannon, even without being dressed in one army’s uniform. Tuco keeps telling you not to worry about it and that he knows where he’s going, with a plainly motivated optimism. You figure at least you’ll probably be fine so long as you avoid any active battlefields, stay on the down low.
It’s all going okay, for a while. You take turns sleeping, and when you’re both awake, Tuco talks, content with your sparse input, relating goofy anecdotes and opinions on anything and everything. When you pay attention, his exaggerated tall tales and fantastical third-hand stories are amusing nonsense; when you zone out, it’s comfortable background noise. You dare to think that this journey will be uneventful from here.
You’d like to think it’s Tuco’s fault when you get captured, for yelling hyperbolic Confederate slogans at the Union cavalry. But it was you who sleepily told him to look at the color of their coats in a dusty gray desert, you who let him yell and helpfully fed him the name of Robert E. Lee instead of stopping him.
No, you’re a couple of idiots, both of you, and God is not on your side.
——
You wait, numb, staring past the walls of the prison camp towards the officers’ cabin where Tuco has been taken. Somber music, almost like a lullaby, drifts from the band lined up in front of it, drowning out whatever sound might be coming from within. The elderly prisoner beside you tells you that Tuco will be beaten for as long as the song goes, that so many of them have had a session in there.
You suppose that means this might be happening even if you hadn’t told him to be Carson. It shouldn’t matter either way; after what Tuco did to you, he deserves it. You have your own plan for him. And yet, this wasn’t part of it, and on some level it rattles you, like a shot that wasn’t meant to miss.
You stare at the cabin, and you know that you might be next. It’s hard not to imagine what might be going on inside, what has already happened to all these men and will keep happening. The guards are forever out of reach in their towers, ready to shoot anyone who tries anything. There’s nothing to do, for any of you, but stand here and wait and let them do what they will. An all too familiar helplessness on a horrid mass scale.
You’d heard of these camps. Squalid conditions, sickness, starvation. Abstract faraway suffering, but now you’re here. You figured the only way out was to impersonate soldiers, real soldiers that the government in Richmond might arrange an exchange for. You knew, at least, that Bill Carson was dead, and Tuco was already wearing his eyepatch. It seemed a reasonable gamble. Why the mercenary at the writing desk took an interest, you don’t know (when did Angel Eyes, the killer for hire, become a Union sergeant?), but you have a sinking feeling it had to do with the same gold you’ve been chasing.
You told Tuco to be Bill Carson, and now he’s in the cabin with Angel Eyes. It shouldn’t be your problem. But it bothers you; all of this bothers you, creeping at your edges, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
The band’s still playing, playing: all hope seems gone, so soldier, march on to die. You stand there and stare at the cabin, and you want to stop all of this.
——
When it’s your turn to be shoved in there, you’re bracing for a beating. Instead, you get a bundle of clothes thrown at you. Angel Eyes announces the war is over for you and you’re going to find two hundred thousand dollars.
Your first thought is Tuco did it – just convinced him to let you both go, in exchange for being in on it. Tuco did insist, before he was taken away, that there was nothing to worry about, that he knows Angel Eyes, that they’re old friends. You didn’t take that very seriously, coming from him, but here the man is, being oddly friendly.
But then you notice the blood on the floor, still fresh under your boot.
No, Tuco was tortured here. Angel Eyes beat the graveyard out of him, the graveyard and the bit where you know the grave. It must have taken a lot, with the lengths Tuco’s been willing to go for this money. The only question is why Angel Eyes isn’t trying to beat the grave out of you.
You look at him, wary. “You’re not gonna give me the same treatment?”
“Would you talk?” he asks by way of answering.
You pause. “No, probably not.” The grave is once again your leverage, after all, the reason to keep you alive. As long as you stay quiet, then he has something to lose by killing you; the moment you give it up, you’re extraneous, a loose end. And if you wouldn’t talk, torturing you wouldn’t get him what he wants, so he won’t waste his time. He is, by all accounts, a practical man.
“That’s what I thought,” he says, casual. “Not that you’re any tougher than Tuco, but you’re smart enough to know that talking won’t save you.”
Something strange coils in your gut at that. “And Tuco. Is he…?”
You stop unbidden before the last word. You don’t want to finish that thought, you realize. Somewhere along the way, something changed, and you don’t want Tuco to be dead.
“No, not yet. But he’s in very good hands.”
So that’s it. It makes sense, you suppose. There’s a bounty on Tuco’s head; no reason they shouldn’t just bring him in to the next town over to be hanged and claim the $3000. And this time you won’t be there to interrupt it.
Angel Eyes throws you your pistol belt, telling you he’s only taking half the money and it’ll all be easier with two of you. You take out the gun, spin the familiar weight in your hand. A strange urge rises in your chest, to point it at his smug hawk face and pull the trigger.
But the urge is fleeting. All it would accomplish is alerting the guards and earning either a bullet or a one-way trip to the gallows further inside the camp, where a body’s still swinging from who knows when. Besides, you don’t like to shoot a man until he’s drawing his weapon, if you can avoid it.
“Yeah.” You give Angel Eyes a stiff smile and slide your gun back into its holster.
——
A small kitten has climbed into your upended hat – a stray, or perhaps a housepet left behind by some of the people flocking out of town. You pick up the hat, gently, and hold your hand up for the kitten to sniff.
Angel Eyes has five men with him. You gambled that some of them might take off and leave him, after you threatened them back in the forest, but they haven’t. If you can get one of them alone apart from the others, maybe, you can take him out safely. But you couldn’t get away with that more than once. There would still be five of them left. Five against one. No matter how you look at it, you’re dead at the graveyard – dead when you tell them, or dead when it becomes obvious that you won’t.
The kitten rubs his head against your finger, pawing around the bowl of the hat. You stroke his soft fur, careful. His tiny body is light and delicate, bones like twigs beneath your fingers. Life, it turns out, is fragile: easy to snuff out, and a lot harder to sustain.
Part of you is beginning to consider doing something reckless. Just shooting, trying to get all six of them, hit every shot in succession, quicker than one of them can shoot you down. It’s not happening. You know it isn’t. But you don’t have a lot of options.
You would simply wait until the graveyard, in case there’s some miraculous opening for a better outcome, sometime — but as you close in, you suspect Angel Eyes will see fit to take precautions, given the threats that didn’t pay off. They could get your gun away from you, if he’s willing to sacrifice whoever you might take down in the process, and then you’ll have nothing. Like in the desert, by the time you get a safer opening, you might not be in a position to use it. Right now, they’re standing here, unawares. You’ve been quiet since the forest. They’ve let their guards down, just a little. Maybe this is as good as it gets.
Normally you wouldn’t even think about it; it’s far too risky, too vanishingly unlikely to pay off. But you can’t stop thinking of the desert, of waiting and waiting and then getting close enough to strike only when you had no power left to do it.
You scratch the kitten’s head, ruffling his fur as his head bumps against your palm. If you did it, you’d have to get him out of the crossfire first. The little guy has no idea how small he is, how fragile. As far as he’s concerned, he’s the size of a lion, invincible and untouchable. Right now, you envy him for that.
The silence stretches. You keep your eyes on the kitten, small whiskers and delicate ears, moving, alive. You keep petting him, inhaling and exhaling, just a little longer.
That’s when four gunshots ring out in the distance, somewhere outside. And you recognize that sound.
Perfect timing.
——
Tuco’s alive, and he’s how you can still win. One against five is suicide. Two against five is foolhardy but possible, and Tuco has every reason to agree to help you take out Angel Eyes.
You distract him with the front door, then come in from the back, just like he did at the inn. He starts as you cock your gun, just stepped out of the bath, stark naked with bubbles still clinging to his arms, and somehow, despite everything, you’ve missed this ridiculous little man.
He’s suspicious, at first. He even has the audacity to point a finger and accuse you of talking, and you don’t even point out the hypocrisy, because it’s so utterly and predictably like him. You wonder if, in his world, what happened in that cabin has gone the same way as what happened between him and his brother, erased and unacknowledged.
Once he realizes that you’ve come to join forces with him against Angel Eyes, though, he lights up with giddy joy, instantly offering to go out and kill him for you. Even when you tell him there’s five of them, he sobers a bit but still announces he’s going to kill them all. He puts his clothes on and walks out there and all you can do is marvel at him. You expect him to come back in and tell you to help, once it sinks in, but he doesn’t. He fully intends to go up against five men by his lonesome, as if to prove himself to you.
You’re not letting him do it alone, of course: the reason you came to him was to have two of you. For better or worse, if you’re going to die here, you’ll do it together. But you can’t help but smile as you follow him outside, lingering to see how long it takes him to notice that you haven’t left him to the wolves.
——
The prospect of blowing up this bridge has filled you with a new sense of purpose. This senseless, wasteful slaughter, all this pointless suffering with no end – you can do something about it. You can stop it, this time.
(Or, as Tuco pointed out, the soldiers may all simply be sent off to the next bridge to die there instead. You can’t deny that maybe nothing you can do will truly halt the crushing cruelty of the war machine. But if nothing else, you can at least give the poor captain a flicker of hope before he dies, up there in the hills where he lies shot and bleeding on a stretcher, drinking his last agonized hours away.)
When Tuco starts talking about how you’re risking your lives, you know he’s thinking of the gold, and you respond in your usual deadpan way. Sure enough, a minute later he proposes you tell each other your secrets – and that you should go first. Tuco’s transparent as ever.
“No, I think it’s better that you start.”
You expect him to grumble and return to the job. But instead, he says, “All right. The name of the cemetery is…”
You turn your head. Tuco struggles mightily with himself, preparing to say something as no sound comes out. You wait for the moment he says forget it and drops it. But he’s still staring at you, lips silently miming unsaid syllables. He’s fighting every instinct he has.
And then he actually blurts it out. “Sad Hill! Now it’s your turn.”
Sad Hill Cemetery. To your surprise, you’re pretty sure he’s not lying. He made false starts, prepared lies, but this wasn’t one of them. He looks tense, in disbelief that he even said it, waiting for you to return the favor.
You could kill him right now and go on to the graveyard by yourself. Tuco knows you could. He told you anyway. The man actually trusts you. And he shouldn’t.
You can’t tell him the truth, of course. It would be insane to trust him with the real location of the grave. He probably wouldn’t kill you right now, but he would ditch you if he had the chance. You’ve planned it all out, how you can win, and telling him would compromise all of it.
No, you need to tell him the wrong name. You need to force Angel Eyes to reveal himself at the wrong grave. And there’s only one name in that graveyard that you know.
——
In the night, in the quiet after the soldiers leave, you empty Tuco’s gun. As he snores in that ridiculous position, you reach for his pistol, open the cylinder, and remove the cartridges, tucking them away in your pocket before quietly putting the gun back where it was.
It’s the only thing that makes sense: it removes him from the equation, lets you focus on Angel Eyes, whenever he shows up. And it’s the only way you can ensure that you won’t have to shoot Tuco. You really don’t want to have to shoot him.
It’s funny. You’ve been thinking about the graveyard since the monastery. You were going to leave him hanging helpless from a rope while you snatched the money away, and then you would ride away and let him die, somewhere far behind you where you wouldn’t have to know about it and you’d never have to see him again. You’ve pictured it all vividly in your head. And you don’t want that anymore. The thought actually turns your gut a little.
And yet, you can still hear his sadistic laugh in your ears, feel thick rope in your hands and the squeeze around your throat and scorching sand digging into your skin, aching muscles and parched tongue and the sickening certainty that you were dying. You’re used to filing it all away and biding your time, to idle future plans tiding you over as you silently wait for your chance. While you waited, you grew strangely fond of him, and you lost your taste for turning away while people die. But there’s a dark, nauseating rage within you that was bound up in that plan, and when you consider just letting it all go, joining Tuco in his world where it never happened, your skin crawls.
You want to point your gun and order him to get up on something and put a rope around his neck. You want to make him stare helplessly at the gold as you deny it to him. You want it to dawn on him that he’s going to die. You want to see naked fear on his face. You want to ride away, somewhere he can’t follow, somewhere you can breathe.
And you want him to live. You want him unharmed, free to keep being his ridiculous, straightforward, naïve Tuco self, wherever he ends up next. You even want to leave him half the money. There’s no good reason you should; you’re certain he’d take it all himself if he could. But you’re hoping he’ll give you some way to justify leaving it.
It doesn’t make much sense. Tuco might not have shot you on the spot for telling him about Arch Stanton, but there’s a reason you just emptied his gun. With the money at stake, you suspect he would betray anyone at all. Normally, when a man prepares to draw his gun on you, you shoot first and lose no sleep over it. And yet, here you are, hoping to save a man who has already tried to kill you and worse.
Tuco still snores, oblivious. You exhale as you lie down to finally sleep. Tomorrow, you’ll do what you have to do to win and ride off into the sunset. But you hope he’ll come out of it alive.
——
There’s not much you can do for the young soldier who lies bleeding and shivering in the ruined chapel, eyes desperately pleading for something he can’t verbalize, but you go to him anyway. You lay your coat on him to keep him warm, give him a drag of your cigar that seems to calm him down a little, but none of it changes the fact that he’s dying in agony. Would he have died here, now, if you hadn’t blown up the bridge? You don’t know, and you never will.
You figure if nothing else you can stay with him, keep him company in his last moments. But then you look away for a second at a horse’s neigh, and by the time you look back down, the soldier is already gone, the last wisps of smoke drifting from his mouth.
You leave your coat there covering him – a feeble consolation to yourself, if too late for the kid.
When you stand up to leave, Tuco has taken the horse and is riding away. He’s why you missed the soldier’s passing, you realize – him, taking the horse so that he could betray you.
And you’re not surprised; your plan accounted for this. Of course he would, and you knew it. You knew it, but you wanted him not to. You really wanted him not to, and he did it anyway, and you stupidly looked up. Tuco didn’t care for the soldier’s suffering, and he would probably kill you for that gold, and you knew that.
The cannon standing there, pointed off in the same direction, is still loaded. It probably wouldn’t hit him, only scare him. Probably. But right now, as the soldier lies dead under your coat, you figure if it does hit him, it’s on him.
You take the cigar back out of your mouth, and you light the fuse.
——
When you catch up with Tuco at Arch Stanton’s grave, he stares at you, wary, and drags his hand slowly towards his pistol.
You know he’s harmless, his gun empty. You could let him pull the trigger, for all the good it’d do him. You could shoot him and be done with it, and then wait for Angel Eyes to show up and deal with him alone. But you don’t. You press your lips together and shake your head and wordlessly show your own gun, silently willing him to stop and let you save both of you.
You half-expect him to go for it anyway, to try to shoot first since you didn’t. But he doesn’t. Instead, he plays it off with a fiddle with his jacket and an awkward shrug. And a smile tugs at your lips. As ever, Tuco is Tuco – and he’d rather not kill you, either.
He looks to you for permission to keep digging, in implicit unquestioning acceptance that you’ll be sharing the gold. You suspect he’s forgotten all about Angel Eyes. But you nod. Let him dig up Arch Stanton, and you can play your hand when the third player arrives.
——
When it’s all over, Angel Eyes lying dead in an open grave, you pick up the blank rock, and you smile at Tuco.
Tuco, Tuco. In the end, he went for Angel Eyes – several times, without ever so much as pointing his revolver at you. He flinched when you cocked your gun again, convinced you were going for him – but even then he never tried to shoot you. Maybe he never would have actually taken the shot, back at the grave.
(Every time he’s tried to kill you, you realize, he’s hesitated, and here you still are, despite everything.)
Tuco smiles nervously back at you, and then he looks at his pistol, and he realizes.
He wasn’t happy you lied about the grave, and you knew he wouldn’t be happy about this, either. He snarls that you wanted to get him killed. And of course, you don’t, and that’s one of the reasons you did it. But if you did, there would be nothing he could do about it now. You won. You’re in control; you know the real grave; you’ve got the loaded gun. What happens to him now is, finally, entirely up to you.
So you tell him there are two kinds of people in this world. You let him dig, almost doglike in his excitement. And while he digs, so mesmerized by the grave you’ve been looking for that he can’t see anything else, you tie a noose, with the rope that you nabbed from the Union encampment, and you loop it over a tree branch.
(Now put the rope around your neck, Tuco’s voice says in your head, laced with malice, and you clench your teeth as you fasten the rope to the base of the tree.)
When Tuco finally looks up, you expect more hypocritical anger about yet another betrayal. Instead, he’s limply uncomprehending, gold coins falling forgotten between his fingers. He actually gets up there on your command, on a viciously unsteady cross, and puts his head in the noose. You’re lowering your gun before he’s even done and he does it anyway. He trusts you still, thinks you’re just joking around or making a point. Naïve, simple Tuco – and he’s right, and you can’t stand it.
The dark rage trembles in your chest as you pull his hands behind his back and tie them together with a piece of string, pulling it tight enough to hurt.
You don’t tell him, This is how you hang somebody, Tuco.
(Now make sure the rope is tight. It’s got to hold the weight of a pig.)
You pull on the rope, and the noose tightens around his throat. (It’s too big for your neck, huh? We fix that right away.) His eyes are wide with terrified disbelief, completely helpless and at your mercy, and the monster in your chest relishes it.
You lead Angel Eyes’ horse to the grave, then stop to take in the sight of him there – bound, stiff, feet wobbling, sweat beading on his forehead.
“Well, now.” There’s a hot tingling in your neck, crawling up the back of your scalp. “Seems just like old times.”
His brows furrow in puzzlement as you load four bags onto the horse but leave the others – four for you, and four for me. He stares at the precious coins from the bag he already split, scattered on the ground just there, forever out of reach. (You want some water? Drink. Drink! Come on, come on!)
It’s almost infuriating how long it’s taking him to catch on, to not catch on. But that’s Tuco. Furious about betrayal and yet so oddly trusting. Even after all you’ve done. Even after all he’s done.
He finally says something: “Hey, Blon— Blond—”
The cross creaks dangerously underneath him. You fight not to look at him as you mount the horse.
“Hey, Bl— Blondie?”
(“And Shorty?”)
(“No.”)
You tip your hat to him. “Sorry, Tuco.”
You ride off as he yells after you, his confusion finally giving way to naked desperation. The growing fear in his screams cuts through you like a knife carving out gangrenous tissue as you draw further and further away. You don’t look back, but you listen, all the way until you’ve turned behind some distant trees, where Tuco can’t see you anymore, and you stop.
You take a deep breath, staring towards the hills ahead, pulse pounding in your veins. There’s another faint, choked-up scream in the distance, driving the knife in, the necrotic rot in your brain twitching and shriveling like a dying insect.
You take another breath. That’s enough, isn’t it? That’s enough. The dark rage has curled up and faded into a hollow coldness. You can’t hear Tuco anymore, and for a sickening, lightheaded moment you think he might have fallen off the cross after all. With sudden alarm, you steer the horse back out into the open, quickly – but he’s still standing, slightly off-balance but still with his feet on the wobbling grave marker, and you exhale, lips tugging upward. Of course. Tuco’s too stubborn to die that easily.
You lift your rifle, steady it on your forearm, raise the sight. Account for the wind. The rope is still. Carefully, carefully, you take aim, lining up the sight. Just like old times.
(Whoever double-crosses me and leaves me alive, he understands nothing about Tuco, he says in your head with a dark chuckle. Nothing!)
Well, you do know Tuco, all his little quirks and hypocrisies and absurdities, and you’ve never been more determined to land a shot.
You pull the trigger, you hit the rope dead-on, and a man who once trusted you screams as he falls, onto a hundred thousand dollars in gold that are now his. As you turn the horse around, he yells helpless obscenities.
He may come after you; he already managed to track you down once. You’re oddly at peace with that. Maybe you deserve what’s coming, after this. But there’s a new conviction in your chest: even with no hidden cache of gold and no name on a grave, you no longer think Tuco has it in him to kill you.
By the time he finds you – when you’ve had room to breathe – you may miss his face again.
This fic will probably make sense if you've seen the film and remember the general gist of what happens in it. If you have not, it does brush over significant sections of the plot, so there may be points of confusion regarding what's going on in the background and you may miss some things being alluded to, but the character progression hopefully still makes sense, so I won't stop you attempting to read it if you haven't. (That said, again, you can find the whole thing on YouTube for free, it's the #10 film on IMDb's top 250 films of all time list, and if you watch the film there are a million and one references in other things that you will get, including the excellent soundtrack by Ennio Morricone which you have definitely heard at least two tracks from even if you didn't know where they were from. You know that one piece of music that's the stereotypical Western music? It's the main theme of this film.)
If you enjoy this fic, you may also enjoy my ridiculous 36k words of meta-rambling about this film and everything in it (the meta sort of spoils the fic, though, so if you'd like to read both, it probably makes sense to do the fic first).
Contains hangings, gun violence, torture, dehydration, humiliation, an inhumane prison camp, the horrors of war, twisted revenge schemes, and unhealthy coping with trauma.
When you shoot at the rope, it grazes it but doesn’t sever it. For a couple of seconds, Tuco dangles from the noose like a sack of potatoes, a choked scream squeezing from his constricting throat. The next shot gets him down.
You didn’t mean to miss. You had told Tuco that reducing your cut might interfere with your aim, but that was why he’d dropped it and you’d stuck with fifty-fifty. You’d had a fleeting thought of scaring him a little, just to warn him about bringing up percentages again, but nah. That shot was meant to be it. Wind? The movement of the horse? Just a moment of carelessness?
It doesn’t matter. Tuco’s down now, and that’s the end of it. You shoot off some hats for good measure, and the two of you ride out of town.
——
“What are you trying to say? Anybody can miss a shot? Nobody misses when I’m at the end of the rope!”
You’re used to Tuco’s rambling bluster and over-the-top played-up insults, but the current flavor grates on your nerves more than usual. The fury in Tuco’s voice is genuine, the rope that almost killed him still hanging around his neck, and he will not stop talking, will not let it go, even when you’ve already told him the one thing you have to say about it.
“You’ve never had a rope around your neck,” Tuco rants on behind you. “Well, I’m going to tell you something. When that rope starts to pull tight, you can feel the devil bite your ass!”
You pull your horse to a stop, an unpleasant taste in your mouth. No, you’ve never had a rope around your neck, and you don’t plan to. You don’t have to listen to this. You don’t need this. What’s Tuco? Nothing. Some two-bit criminal runt. You can find another two-bit criminal, easy. One who spends less time complaining to the guy who saved his life and got him a thousand dollars for the trouble. Maybe even one who’s worth more than Tuco’s trumped-up three thousand.
“Yeah, you’re right,” you say, pulling Tuco down from your horse. “It’s getting tougher.”
He’ll probably make it back to town. Or not. Either way, you’ll be far away, and whatever happens to Tuco will no longer be your problem.
——
You weren’t expecting to ever see Tuco again. But now he’s here, sitting inside the window, pointing a gun at you. And meanwhile, you’ve just stupidly fired your final bullet at a guy who was probably seconds from collapsing anyway.
(They were in cahoots, clearly. Distract you with a sudden attack from the door and then get the jump on you from the other side. Tuco’s smarter than you gave him credit for – not that that’s saying much.)
On the other hand, Tuco had a clean shot at point-blank range, and instead he chose to announce himself and tell you to disarm.
Your pistol’s empty, but you take off your belt anyway. When a guy’s got a gun pointed at you, and yours isn’t loaded, you do what he says. You figure Tuco wants to talk, to gloat about his victory, to demand his half of the bounty or all of it, to try to strong-arm you into reestablishing your partnership. You figure one way or another he must be planning to lower the gun, given he hasn’t shot you yet.
You at least figure, once he’s grimly cocked his gun at you, that if you point out the storm is probably cannon fire he’ll see this isn’t the time for his nonsense and you should both get the hell out of this place before it gets any closer.
Instead, Tuco throws a rope at you.
“Throw it over the roof beam.”
Slowly, you unfurl the rope, the large noose at the end of it. If Tuco just wanted to kill you, he could have shot you already. But no, this is all some strange, sick game about You’ve never had a rope around your neck, isn’t it. You sent him to the noose, twice, and now he wants you to know how it feels.
Tuco’s gun is still on you. The rope is thick and coarse in your hands. You throw it.
“Now get on that.” He indicates the stool by the bed before pointing the gun back squarely at your chest.
You hook your foot around the legs of the stool, dragging it in front of you. It’s a small stool; it hardly gives any height. Your hands are free. He hasn’t thought this out very well. The problem is the gun.
“That’s right.” As you step onto the stool, Tuco’s eyes are steady, fixed on you with grim satisfaction. “Now make sure the rope is tight. It’s got to hold the weight of a pig.”
Slowly, you take the noose and thread it through the loop, then pull it down, yanking on it. The rope holds firm.
If Tuco’s doing this, really doing this, then you’re going to have to slip out of the noose when he’s distracted. It’s wide, much wider than it has to be. You could yank your head back and be out. Grab the rope before it tightens. Easy. But then there’s the gun. Any sudden movement and odds are you’re dead anyway. If he came closer, maybe – but why would he? He could just stand there and give you five seconds to jump before he shoots. What then?
Tuco glares up at you, gaze deadly firm. He hasn’t moved, hasn’t taken his eyes off you. “Now put the rope around your neck.”
You pull the noose apart and carefully push your head through it. The rope hangs loose, not even touching your skin, but your throat is tightening anyway, squeezed by phantom fibers.
“That’s very good!” says Tuco cheerfully. “It’s too big for your neck, huh? We fix that right away. I have another system, a little different than yours.” He grins a wicked little grin. “I don’t shoot the rope. I shoot the legs off the stool.”
The stool. You tense, muscles coiled to react. You’ll have to slip out of the noose the same moment he shoots, keep your balance, land on your feet. And then… rush him? Lunge towards him, try to wrestle the gun out of his hands before he can fire again? Risky, risky, as likely to end with you shot and bleeding on the floor.
For a second, Tuco looks oddly hesitant, staring up at you. You stare back, blood pounding in your ears. Cross the room, zigzagging to throw him off? Or is straight across better, quicker?
He tilts the gun down. “Adiós.”
Slip out of the noose when he shoots, keep your balance, and then—
And then a cannonball bursts through the wall, and the floor falls out from underneath him in a spray of wood and splinters. For a moment you blink at your luck; then you duck your head out of the noose, snatch your pistol belt off what remains of the floor, and sprint out to your horse, before the dust can settle.
On a gallop out of town, your racing pulse slowly calms back to normal, but the tingling itch around your neck lingers.
You’ve had your brushes with death before, times you survived by being faster on the draw. But those moments usually go by very quickly; this was the first time you’ve had quite this long to think about it. You’d like it to be the last.
——
It wasn’t hard to find another two-bit criminal; they’re a dime a dozen out here. As the sheriff reads out Shorty Larson’s criminal history, you aim your rifle. No wind. The horse is still. Careful, careful.
Only then a gun clicks right next to your face.
Seeing Tuco isn’t exactly a surprise anymore, though you don’t know how the hell he tracked you down. The fact he must be here for revenge once again registers abstractly, filed away. You already know that by the time you could swing your rifle around to point it anywhere in his direction, he would have already put a bullet through your skull. Somehow the first words that float through your head are, “And Shorty?”
Tuco looks towards the hanging, for just a moment. “No.”
“No?”
Tuco shakes his head. That’s it, you suppose. Again, when a guy has a gun pointed at you, you do what he says if you want to live. You can’t quite look away from Shorty, oblivious, waiting for a saving shot that won’t come.
The whip strikes, the horse bolts, and a man who trusted you chokes and dies, legs spasming feebly in the air before he goes still.
“Sorry, Shorty,” you mutter. Tuco takes your rifle and tells you to get up. Your gaze lingers on the swinging body as you rise to your feet, a familiar phantom itch snaking its way around your throat.
——
At first you think Tuco’s taking you somewhere, but once he casually shoots the canteen out of your hands and the hat off your head, you can see where this is going.
Tuco stays merrily out of reach on his horse, with all three guns, all smiles.
At first it all seems very abstract, just walking. You idly imagine how mad Tuco will be if you make it those one hundred miles. But it doesn’t take long before you know deep in your gut that that’s not happening. The heat is suffocating, your tongue dried into a slab glued to the roof of your mouth, your skin burning and itching and flaking and peeling, sweat stinging where it seeps into the open sores underneath. Your legs have gone numb, dragging unsteadily through the sand as you will them to lift. You’re not sure exactly how far you’ve gone, but it’s nowhere close, and already you’re pretty sure this is what Hell feels like.
Maybe it was a bastard move to leave Tuco in the desert.
It’s hard to feel sorry about it now, though, when Tuco is a constant, taunting presence, grinning as he takes indulgent gulps of water right in front of you, cackling with glee every time you stumble, ordering you onward if you stop walking for more than a couple of seconds — always far enough away you’d never make it close before he’d shoot.
In the end, your legs stop listening entirely. You tell them to keep walking, nothing happens at all, and then you’re on your knees and then lying face-down, scorching sand digging into your sunburnt face. You try to lift your head but you can’t, eyelids swollen and shut. Your body wants you to just lie there and sleep. It’s tempting. It’s not like you could keep walking even if you tried.
Tuco’s laugh sounds somewhere above you. Then the soft thunk of a foot stepping into the sand, very close by.
You fight through the haze of exhaustion to tear your eyes open, vision double and unfocused and swimming. All you can process is that Tuco’s boot is there, right by your face. Within reach.
You may not be able to move your legs, but you think you could move your hands. With clenched teeth, you call on every last scrap of energy left in your body and grasp for the boot: pull it, trip him before he can draw, and then maybe, maybe you can get his gun before he—
The boot is empty, folding between your clutching fingers. Ahead, somewhere out of reach, there’s a splash. Tuco’s laughing again. You drag your head upwards and find him bathing his feet in a large wooden tub, pouring water over his toes.
You let go of the useless boot, head slumping. And yet. You can’t quite tear your mind away from that mesmerizing sound of splashing water, your parched throat raw and aching. You look back over at the tub and hate yourself for it.
Between the thirst and the exhaustion, though, the revulsion refuses to stick, and somewhere in the back of your mind is the creeping awareness that if you go too much longer without water, you won’t live to enjoy your dignity anyway. When you drag yourself towards the tub, Tuco notices immediately with unbridled glee, pushing it towards you in invitation.
“You want some water?” He sticks his foot back in it, just to taunt you. “Drink. Drink! Come on, come on!”
And you don’t care anymore. Maybe, just maybe, the sheer rock-bottom humiliation of this will be entertaining enough to him that he’ll actually let you have it.
Instead, the moment you have your fingers on the edge of the tub and start lifting your head, Tuco upends it, the water sinking uselessly into the sand.
Fueled by a last heaving rush of spite, you manage to pull yourself up onto all fours. There’s some fantasy in your head about rushing him when he doesn’t expect it, seeing his eyes widen, wrestling the gun from him. But Tuco hasn’t so much as bothered to have his gun ready even as you were rising, just sits there casually pulling his boots back on. He’s so close, and yet you couldn’t manage more than a pathetic four-legged stumble in his direction right now, and Tuco knows it.
You look at him for a moment before deciding you’re not giving him the satisfaction of the attempt. You’ll just keep going, crawl the rest of his hundred miles or die doing it. If you’re going to die, maybe you can at least do it a little farther away from that inescapable taunting laugh.
You don’t make it very far, rolling pathetically down a hill and then just collapsing. When Tuco catches up, in no hurry, he finally just points his gun at you, sensing this is all he’s getting out of you. You don’t have the energy to do anything about it.
You swallow the dry, sticky copper taste in your mouth and hope it’s quick.
Again, Tuco hesitates longer than he needs to. And that’s when you hear hooves in the distance.
——
When you drag yourself towards the runaway wagon on the feeble scrap of strength you’ve recovered, you’re mostly figuring maybe, somehow, you can get the jump on Tuco while he’s distracted looting it. You end up making it there only when Tuco’s running back to his horse. But instead, you manage to shakily prop yourself up against the back of the wagon to see who it is he’s fetching water for, and the eye-patched rebel soldier hanging out of it chokes out something about gold buried in a grave marked “Unknown”, beside an Arch Stanton, before going limp.
When Tuco returns in a rage and threatens to kill you, you tell him then he’ll always be poor. It’s a bluff, really: you don’t know where the hell this supposed grave is, couldn’t make out whatever the guy said to Tuco before he went to get the water, and if this is truly all you’ve got, you couldn’t find it any more than he could. But the look on his face when you mention a name on a grave says everything. Tuco wants this money more than anything, and now you’re his only way to get it. The man who’s been hunting you down to torture and kill you now has every reason to do whatever it takes to keep you alive.
And with that final moment of triumph, a strange, blissful calm comes over you. The raw survival instinct that’s somehow kept you going through all of this finally loosens its clawing grip on your feverish mind and lets it succumb to exhaustion. As your consciousness dissolves into a comfortable haze, you smirk with the faint beginnings of a victorious chuckle.
Somewhere in the distance, Tuco begs you not to die and babbles that he’s your friend. You’d better be, you rat! you think as you drift away.
——
Now that he’s harmless, forced to help you by his own greed, Tuco has come to seem more amusing than anything else. The absurd, ridiculous monologue standing over your bed, an incoherent series of frantic, desperate, nakedly contradictory efforts to convince you to tell him the name. The naïve, excited way he actually leans in close when you beckon, as if you’re really going to tell him and not throw coffee in his face. The way that he will fetch you anything you ask for, grumbling insults all the while, only to instantly swap to fawning hymns about how much you mean to him whenever the monks are around.
You told him you’d sleep better with your good friend by your side to protect you just to rub in that you know exactly how much leverage you’ve got, but curiously, you find that you actually do. Normally, you sleep very lightly, hand on your gun, snapping to alertness at any unusual noise. It’s probably mostly the exhaustion and the damage your body’s healing off. But it doesn’t hurt to know that any would-be assassin would have to contend with this insane little rat-bandit and the dollar signs in his eyes before they could get to you.
Tuco unnecessarily explained to you the morning after you arrived, like a trump card, that without him, you can’t find the gold either. You spelled out the natural conclusion that neither of you finds the gold unless you both go together. Tuco doesn’t like it, but the gold trumps everything else for him.
You’d be content without the gold. You’ve gotten by this long on claiming bounties and shooting ropes. But there’s a plan forming in your head, has been since you got here. You’ll play the long game; you’ll come with him; you’ll let him take you to the graveyard with the unknown grave. And then, before his own inevitable betrayal, you’ll make him put his head into a noose. Make him watch helplessly as you snatch his precious money away, like a drink of water disappearing into the desert sand.
That final victory will be worth more than the money. And then you can forget about all this – about the shot that missed, about the walk through the desert, about the texture of the rope and the peeling itch in your skin. You’ll have your own sweet revenge, you’ll ride off into the sunset, and you’ll never see him again.
——
When Tuco goes to meet with a “Father Ramirez”, the day you’re about to head off, you’re curious – curious, because Father Ramirez is obviously related to Tuco Ramirez, and because any further leverage or insight could be useful later.
What you find when you discreetly peek in at their meeting is two estranged brothers bitterly coming to blows. What Tuco tells you as you set off in the wagon afterwards, abrupt forced cheer breaking through his obvious sour mood, is that they just had soup together, that his brother’s in charge of everything and what a nice guy he is, that he begged Tuco to stay longer.
You can’t help turning your head, the corners of your lips tugging upward. The lie is egregious and completely without purpose, in obvious, naked contradiction with the previous lie he told you about having no family. And in order to tell it to you, he’s talking to you like a friend again, with no one else even watching. You wonder if he has even noticed the incongruity, if he ever so much as keeps track.
No, this is just who Tuco is. As he licks his wounds, he imagines the meeting he’d rather have had and makes it real by telling you about it. Pretends you’re friends because he needs one. Tells you he had a hearty meal to persuade his own empty stomach. His most adamant lies, you’ve begun to suspect, are to himself.
You give a wry smile. “Sure.” You consider making some remark to suggest you saw everything, watching his face contort with flustered rage, reveling once again in the fact he won’t touch you so long as you know the name on that grave. But some tug of pity compels you not to. Tuco could have just told you his brother’s a worthless bastard; instead, he talked him up, created this fragile, better world for himself, and then was desperate enough to choose to entrust you with it.
“Well,” you say instead, “after a meal there’s nothing like a good cigar.”
You hold your cigar out without looking at him. Earlier, before he went to see his brother, you casually offered him your cigar in response to his harmless insults; he dropped it on the monastery floor and put it out with his foot. This time, he takes it, gives you a wary look, and then puts it in his mouth, giving it a puff.
It does cheer him up. It’s not long before he’s put on a somewhat desperate grin, and eventually he gets to making small talk, in more comfortably cheerful, friendly tones, as if he’d never felt anything else toward you. It’s transparent, but you’ll take it.
——
The war is getting harder to ignore. You pass piles of dead men sprawled on the ground as you travel deeper into contested territory. Tuco won’t tell you precisely where you’re headed – not that you can blame him, exactly.
It sets your nerves on edge: you want nothing to do with the war. Getting caught up anywhere close to it is a recipe for getting yourself killed, and you’ve already been one stroke of pure luck away from being blown to smithereens by a cannon, even without being dressed in one army’s uniform. Tuco keeps telling you not to worry about it and that he knows where he’s going, with a plainly motivated optimism. You figure at least you’ll probably be fine so long as you avoid any active battlefields, stay on the down low.
It’s all going okay, for a while. You take turns sleeping, and when you’re both awake, Tuco talks, content with your sparse input, relating goofy anecdotes and opinions on anything and everything. When you pay attention, his exaggerated tall tales and fantastical third-hand stories are amusing nonsense; when you zone out, it’s comfortable background noise. You dare to think that this journey will be uneventful from here.
You’d like to think it’s Tuco’s fault when you get captured, for yelling hyperbolic Confederate slogans at the Union cavalry. But it was you who sleepily told him to look at the color of their coats in a dusty gray desert, you who let him yell and helpfully fed him the name of Robert E. Lee instead of stopping him.
No, you’re a couple of idiots, both of you, and God is not on your side.
——
You wait, numb, staring past the walls of the prison camp towards the officers’ cabin where Tuco has been taken. Somber music, almost like a lullaby, drifts from the band lined up in front of it, drowning out whatever sound might be coming from within. The elderly prisoner beside you tells you that Tuco will be beaten for as long as the song goes, that so many of them have had a session in there.
You suppose that means this might be happening even if you hadn’t told him to be Carson. It shouldn’t matter either way; after what Tuco did to you, he deserves it. You have your own plan for him. And yet, this wasn’t part of it, and on some level it rattles you, like a shot that wasn’t meant to miss.
You stare at the cabin, and you know that you might be next. It’s hard not to imagine what might be going on inside, what has already happened to all these men and will keep happening. The guards are forever out of reach in their towers, ready to shoot anyone who tries anything. There’s nothing to do, for any of you, but stand here and wait and let them do what they will. An all too familiar helplessness on a horrid mass scale.
You’d heard of these camps. Squalid conditions, sickness, starvation. Abstract faraway suffering, but now you’re here. You figured the only way out was to impersonate soldiers, real soldiers that the government in Richmond might arrange an exchange for. You knew, at least, that Bill Carson was dead, and Tuco was already wearing his eyepatch. It seemed a reasonable gamble. Why the mercenary at the writing desk took an interest, you don’t know (when did Angel Eyes, the killer for hire, become a Union sergeant?), but you have a sinking feeling it had to do with the same gold you’ve been chasing.
You told Tuco to be Bill Carson, and now he’s in the cabin with Angel Eyes. It shouldn’t be your problem. But it bothers you; all of this bothers you, creeping at your edges, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
The band’s still playing, playing: all hope seems gone, so soldier, march on to die. You stand there and stare at the cabin, and you want to stop all of this.
——
When it’s your turn to be shoved in there, you’re bracing for a beating. Instead, you get a bundle of clothes thrown at you. Angel Eyes announces the war is over for you and you’re going to find two hundred thousand dollars.
Your first thought is Tuco did it – just convinced him to let you both go, in exchange for being in on it. Tuco did insist, before he was taken away, that there was nothing to worry about, that he knows Angel Eyes, that they’re old friends. You didn’t take that very seriously, coming from him, but here the man is, being oddly friendly.
But then you notice the blood on the floor, still fresh under your boot.
No, Tuco was tortured here. Angel Eyes beat the graveyard out of him, the graveyard and the bit where you know the grave. It must have taken a lot, with the lengths Tuco’s been willing to go for this money. The only question is why Angel Eyes isn’t trying to beat the grave out of you.
You look at him, wary. “You’re not gonna give me the same treatment?”
“Would you talk?” he asks by way of answering.
You pause. “No, probably not.” The grave is once again your leverage, after all, the reason to keep you alive. As long as you stay quiet, then he has something to lose by killing you; the moment you give it up, you’re extraneous, a loose end. And if you wouldn’t talk, torturing you wouldn’t get him what he wants, so he won’t waste his time. He is, by all accounts, a practical man.
“That’s what I thought,” he says, casual. “Not that you’re any tougher than Tuco, but you’re smart enough to know that talking won’t save you.”
Something strange coils in your gut at that. “And Tuco. Is he…?”
You stop unbidden before the last word. You don’t want to finish that thought, you realize. Somewhere along the way, something changed, and you don’t want Tuco to be dead.
“No, not yet. But he’s in very good hands.”
So that’s it. It makes sense, you suppose. There’s a bounty on Tuco’s head; no reason they shouldn’t just bring him in to the next town over to be hanged and claim the $3000. And this time you won’t be there to interrupt it.
Angel Eyes throws you your pistol belt, telling you he’s only taking half the money and it’ll all be easier with two of you. You take out the gun, spin the familiar weight in your hand. A strange urge rises in your chest, to point it at his smug hawk face and pull the trigger.
But the urge is fleeting. All it would accomplish is alerting the guards and earning either a bullet or a one-way trip to the gallows further inside the camp, where a body’s still swinging from who knows when. Besides, you don’t like to shoot a man until he’s drawing his weapon, if you can avoid it.
“Yeah.” You give Angel Eyes a stiff smile and slide your gun back into its holster.
——
A small kitten has climbed into your upended hat – a stray, or perhaps a housepet left behind by some of the people flocking out of town. You pick up the hat, gently, and hold your hand up for the kitten to sniff.
Angel Eyes has five men with him. You gambled that some of them might take off and leave him, after you threatened them back in the forest, but they haven’t. If you can get one of them alone apart from the others, maybe, you can take him out safely. But you couldn’t get away with that more than once. There would still be five of them left. Five against one. No matter how you look at it, you’re dead at the graveyard – dead when you tell them, or dead when it becomes obvious that you won’t.
The kitten rubs his head against your finger, pawing around the bowl of the hat. You stroke his soft fur, careful. His tiny body is light and delicate, bones like twigs beneath your fingers. Life, it turns out, is fragile: easy to snuff out, and a lot harder to sustain.
Part of you is beginning to consider doing something reckless. Just shooting, trying to get all six of them, hit every shot in succession, quicker than one of them can shoot you down. It’s not happening. You know it isn’t. But you don’t have a lot of options.
You would simply wait until the graveyard, in case there’s some miraculous opening for a better outcome, sometime — but as you close in, you suspect Angel Eyes will see fit to take precautions, given the threats that didn’t pay off. They could get your gun away from you, if he’s willing to sacrifice whoever you might take down in the process, and then you’ll have nothing. Like in the desert, by the time you get a safer opening, you might not be in a position to use it. Right now, they’re standing here, unawares. You’ve been quiet since the forest. They’ve let their guards down, just a little. Maybe this is as good as it gets.
Normally you wouldn’t even think about it; it’s far too risky, too vanishingly unlikely to pay off. But you can’t stop thinking of the desert, of waiting and waiting and then getting close enough to strike only when you had no power left to do it.
You scratch the kitten’s head, ruffling his fur as his head bumps against your palm. If you did it, you’d have to get him out of the crossfire first. The little guy has no idea how small he is, how fragile. As far as he’s concerned, he’s the size of a lion, invincible and untouchable. Right now, you envy him for that.
The silence stretches. You keep your eyes on the kitten, small whiskers and delicate ears, moving, alive. You keep petting him, inhaling and exhaling, just a little longer.
That’s when four gunshots ring out in the distance, somewhere outside. And you recognize that sound.
Perfect timing.
——
Tuco’s alive, and he’s how you can still win. One against five is suicide. Two against five is foolhardy but possible, and Tuco has every reason to agree to help you take out Angel Eyes.
You distract him with the front door, then come in from the back, just like he did at the inn. He starts as you cock your gun, just stepped out of the bath, stark naked with bubbles still clinging to his arms, and somehow, despite everything, you’ve missed this ridiculous little man.
He’s suspicious, at first. He even has the audacity to point a finger and accuse you of talking, and you don’t even point out the hypocrisy, because it’s so utterly and predictably like him. You wonder if, in his world, what happened in that cabin has gone the same way as what happened between him and his brother, erased and unacknowledged.
Once he realizes that you’ve come to join forces with him against Angel Eyes, though, he lights up with giddy joy, instantly offering to go out and kill him for you. Even when you tell him there’s five of them, he sobers a bit but still announces he’s going to kill them all. He puts his clothes on and walks out there and all you can do is marvel at him. You expect him to come back in and tell you to help, once it sinks in, but he doesn’t. He fully intends to go up against five men by his lonesome, as if to prove himself to you.
You’re not letting him do it alone, of course: the reason you came to him was to have two of you. For better or worse, if you’re going to die here, you’ll do it together. But you can’t help but smile as you follow him outside, lingering to see how long it takes him to notice that you haven’t left him to the wolves.
——
The prospect of blowing up this bridge has filled you with a new sense of purpose. This senseless, wasteful slaughter, all this pointless suffering with no end – you can do something about it. You can stop it, this time.
(Or, as Tuco pointed out, the soldiers may all simply be sent off to the next bridge to die there instead. You can’t deny that maybe nothing you can do will truly halt the crushing cruelty of the war machine. But if nothing else, you can at least give the poor captain a flicker of hope before he dies, up there in the hills where he lies shot and bleeding on a stretcher, drinking his last agonized hours away.)
When Tuco starts talking about how you’re risking your lives, you know he’s thinking of the gold, and you respond in your usual deadpan way. Sure enough, a minute later he proposes you tell each other your secrets – and that you should go first. Tuco’s transparent as ever.
“No, I think it’s better that you start.”
You expect him to grumble and return to the job. But instead, he says, “All right. The name of the cemetery is…”
You turn your head. Tuco struggles mightily with himself, preparing to say something as no sound comes out. You wait for the moment he says forget it and drops it. But he’s still staring at you, lips silently miming unsaid syllables. He’s fighting every instinct he has.
And then he actually blurts it out. “Sad Hill! Now it’s your turn.”
Sad Hill Cemetery. To your surprise, you’re pretty sure he’s not lying. He made false starts, prepared lies, but this wasn’t one of them. He looks tense, in disbelief that he even said it, waiting for you to return the favor.
You could kill him right now and go on to the graveyard by yourself. Tuco knows you could. He told you anyway. The man actually trusts you. And he shouldn’t.
You can’t tell him the truth, of course. It would be insane to trust him with the real location of the grave. He probably wouldn’t kill you right now, but he would ditch you if he had the chance. You’ve planned it all out, how you can win, and telling him would compromise all of it.
No, you need to tell him the wrong name. You need to force Angel Eyes to reveal himself at the wrong grave. And there’s only one name in that graveyard that you know.
——
In the night, in the quiet after the soldiers leave, you empty Tuco’s gun. As he snores in that ridiculous position, you reach for his pistol, open the cylinder, and remove the cartridges, tucking them away in your pocket before quietly putting the gun back where it was.
It’s the only thing that makes sense: it removes him from the equation, lets you focus on Angel Eyes, whenever he shows up. And it’s the only way you can ensure that you won’t have to shoot Tuco. You really don’t want to have to shoot him.
It’s funny. You’ve been thinking about the graveyard since the monastery. You were going to leave him hanging helpless from a rope while you snatched the money away, and then you would ride away and let him die, somewhere far behind you where you wouldn’t have to know about it and you’d never have to see him again. You’ve pictured it all vividly in your head. And you don’t want that anymore. The thought actually turns your gut a little.
And yet, you can still hear his sadistic laugh in your ears, feel thick rope in your hands and the squeeze around your throat and scorching sand digging into your skin, aching muscles and parched tongue and the sickening certainty that you were dying. You’re used to filing it all away and biding your time, to idle future plans tiding you over as you silently wait for your chance. While you waited, you grew strangely fond of him, and you lost your taste for turning away while people die. But there’s a dark, nauseating rage within you that was bound up in that plan, and when you consider just letting it all go, joining Tuco in his world where it never happened, your skin crawls.
You want to point your gun and order him to get up on something and put a rope around his neck. You want to make him stare helplessly at the gold as you deny it to him. You want it to dawn on him that he’s going to die. You want to see naked fear on his face. You want to ride away, somewhere he can’t follow, somewhere you can breathe.
And you want him to live. You want him unharmed, free to keep being his ridiculous, straightforward, naïve Tuco self, wherever he ends up next. You even want to leave him half the money. There’s no good reason you should; you’re certain he’d take it all himself if he could. But you’re hoping he’ll give you some way to justify leaving it.
It doesn’t make much sense. Tuco might not have shot you on the spot for telling him about Arch Stanton, but there’s a reason you just emptied his gun. With the money at stake, you suspect he would betray anyone at all. Normally, when a man prepares to draw his gun on you, you shoot first and lose no sleep over it. And yet, here you are, hoping to save a man who has already tried to kill you and worse.
Tuco still snores, oblivious. You exhale as you lie down to finally sleep. Tomorrow, you’ll do what you have to do to win and ride off into the sunset. But you hope he’ll come out of it alive.
——
There’s not much you can do for the young soldier who lies bleeding and shivering in the ruined chapel, eyes desperately pleading for something he can’t verbalize, but you go to him anyway. You lay your coat on him to keep him warm, give him a drag of your cigar that seems to calm him down a little, but none of it changes the fact that he’s dying in agony. Would he have died here, now, if you hadn’t blown up the bridge? You don’t know, and you never will.
You figure if nothing else you can stay with him, keep him company in his last moments. But then you look away for a second at a horse’s neigh, and by the time you look back down, the soldier is already gone, the last wisps of smoke drifting from his mouth.
You leave your coat there covering him – a feeble consolation to yourself, if too late for the kid.
When you stand up to leave, Tuco has taken the horse and is riding away. He’s why you missed the soldier’s passing, you realize – him, taking the horse so that he could betray you.
And you’re not surprised; your plan accounted for this. Of course he would, and you knew it. You knew it, but you wanted him not to. You really wanted him not to, and he did it anyway, and you stupidly looked up. Tuco didn’t care for the soldier’s suffering, and he would probably kill you for that gold, and you knew that.
The cannon standing there, pointed off in the same direction, is still loaded. It probably wouldn’t hit him, only scare him. Probably. But right now, as the soldier lies dead under your coat, you figure if it does hit him, it’s on him.
You take the cigar back out of your mouth, and you light the fuse.
——
When you catch up with Tuco at Arch Stanton’s grave, he stares at you, wary, and drags his hand slowly towards his pistol.
You know he’s harmless, his gun empty. You could let him pull the trigger, for all the good it’d do him. You could shoot him and be done with it, and then wait for Angel Eyes to show up and deal with him alone. But you don’t. You press your lips together and shake your head and wordlessly show your own gun, silently willing him to stop and let you save both of you.
You half-expect him to go for it anyway, to try to shoot first since you didn’t. But he doesn’t. Instead, he plays it off with a fiddle with his jacket and an awkward shrug. And a smile tugs at your lips. As ever, Tuco is Tuco – and he’d rather not kill you, either.
He looks to you for permission to keep digging, in implicit unquestioning acceptance that you’ll be sharing the gold. You suspect he’s forgotten all about Angel Eyes. But you nod. Let him dig up Arch Stanton, and you can play your hand when the third player arrives.
——
When it’s all over, Angel Eyes lying dead in an open grave, you pick up the blank rock, and you smile at Tuco.
Tuco, Tuco. In the end, he went for Angel Eyes – several times, without ever so much as pointing his revolver at you. He flinched when you cocked your gun again, convinced you were going for him – but even then he never tried to shoot you. Maybe he never would have actually taken the shot, back at the grave.
(Every time he’s tried to kill you, you realize, he’s hesitated, and here you still are, despite everything.)
Tuco smiles nervously back at you, and then he looks at his pistol, and he realizes.
He wasn’t happy you lied about the grave, and you knew he wouldn’t be happy about this, either. He snarls that you wanted to get him killed. And of course, you don’t, and that’s one of the reasons you did it. But if you did, there would be nothing he could do about it now. You won. You’re in control; you know the real grave; you’ve got the loaded gun. What happens to him now is, finally, entirely up to you.
So you tell him there are two kinds of people in this world. You let him dig, almost doglike in his excitement. And while he digs, so mesmerized by the grave you’ve been looking for that he can’t see anything else, you tie a noose, with the rope that you nabbed from the Union encampment, and you loop it over a tree branch.
(Now put the rope around your neck, Tuco’s voice says in your head, laced with malice, and you clench your teeth as you fasten the rope to the base of the tree.)
When Tuco finally looks up, you expect more hypocritical anger about yet another betrayal. Instead, he’s limply uncomprehending, gold coins falling forgotten between his fingers. He actually gets up there on your command, on a viciously unsteady cross, and puts his head in the noose. You’re lowering your gun before he’s even done and he does it anyway. He trusts you still, thinks you’re just joking around or making a point. Naïve, simple Tuco – and he’s right, and you can’t stand it.
The dark rage trembles in your chest as you pull his hands behind his back and tie them together with a piece of string, pulling it tight enough to hurt.
You don’t tell him, This is how you hang somebody, Tuco.
(Now make sure the rope is tight. It’s got to hold the weight of a pig.)
You pull on the rope, and the noose tightens around his throat. (It’s too big for your neck, huh? We fix that right away.) His eyes are wide with terrified disbelief, completely helpless and at your mercy, and the monster in your chest relishes it.
You lead Angel Eyes’ horse to the grave, then stop to take in the sight of him there – bound, stiff, feet wobbling, sweat beading on his forehead.
“Well, now.” There’s a hot tingling in your neck, crawling up the back of your scalp. “Seems just like old times.”
His brows furrow in puzzlement as you load four bags onto the horse but leave the others – four for you, and four for me. He stares at the precious coins from the bag he already split, scattered on the ground just there, forever out of reach. (You want some water? Drink. Drink! Come on, come on!)
It’s almost infuriating how long it’s taking him to catch on, to not catch on. But that’s Tuco. Furious about betrayal and yet so oddly trusting. Even after all you’ve done. Even after all he’s done.
He finally says something: “Hey, Blon— Blond—”
The cross creaks dangerously underneath him. You fight not to look at him as you mount the horse.
“Hey, Bl— Blondie?”
(“And Shorty?”)
(“No.”)
You tip your hat to him. “Sorry, Tuco.”
You ride off as he yells after you, his confusion finally giving way to naked desperation. The growing fear in his screams cuts through you like a knife carving out gangrenous tissue as you draw further and further away. You don’t look back, but you listen, all the way until you’ve turned behind some distant trees, where Tuco can’t see you anymore, and you stop.
You take a deep breath, staring towards the hills ahead, pulse pounding in your veins. There’s another faint, choked-up scream in the distance, driving the knife in, the necrotic rot in your brain twitching and shriveling like a dying insect.
You take another breath. That’s enough, isn’t it? That’s enough. The dark rage has curled up and faded into a hollow coldness. You can’t hear Tuco anymore, and for a sickening, lightheaded moment you think he might have fallen off the cross after all. With sudden alarm, you steer the horse back out into the open, quickly – but he’s still standing, slightly off-balance but still with his feet on the wobbling grave marker, and you exhale, lips tugging upward. Of course. Tuco’s too stubborn to die that easily.
You lift your rifle, steady it on your forearm, raise the sight. Account for the wind. The rope is still. Carefully, carefully, you take aim, lining up the sight. Just like old times.
(Whoever double-crosses me and leaves me alive, he understands nothing about Tuco, he says in your head with a dark chuckle. Nothing!)
Well, you do know Tuco, all his little quirks and hypocrisies and absurdities, and you’ve never been more determined to land a shot.
You pull the trigger, you hit the rope dead-on, and a man who once trusted you screams as he falls, onto a hundred thousand dollars in gold that are now his. As you turn the horse around, he yells helpless obscenities.
He may come after you; he already managed to track you down once. You’re oddly at peace with that. Maybe you deserve what’s coming, after this. But there’s a new conviction in your chest: even with no hidden cache of gold and no name on a grave, you no longer think Tuco has it in him to kill you.
By the time he finds you – when you’ve had room to breathe – you may miss his face again.
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