They're five miles down the road before Seth slams his foot on the brake so hard that Richie's head goes into the dashboard.

"What the fuck, brother?" Richie screeches, slamming himself back into a sitting position.

Seth sits there, car idling, hands gripped around the steering wheel.

"We forgot Kate."

"What do you mean, 'we forgot Kate'? She's alive, demon free, with her whole life ahead of her. We just saw her three minutes ago. There is no forgetting Kate." There's no one coming or going, not on this stretch of hole filled, long abandoned road.

Matanzas is still in the rear view, empty, desolate; a ghost town brought to life and painted with blood only to be laid to rest again.

"What the fuck is she going to do, Richard?" he demands. "We just left her in the middle of fucking nowhere, Texas, without a ride. Without money. Without any kind of identification. And she looks like she just wandered out of the other end of a Hot Topic."

Richie holds up a hand, says, "Technically, she and I did just come back from an all expenses paid trip in Hell. Which, you know. Is basically Hot Topic."

"We can't just leave her there," Seth says after a moment of silence. He puts the car back into first, kills it as he takes his foot off the clutch for the first time since he was twelve.

"I wasn't suggesting that."

"We have to go back for her, Richard. She's-"

"Seth. I just agreed that we need to go back for her."

The elder Gecko kills the car again, so that they're sitting sideways in the road, taking up both lanes.

"Do you want me to drive? Because I'll drive. You'll fuck up the clutch if you keep doing that."

"Why did we even leave her there in the first place?" He manages to get the car turned around and guns it, shifting from first to second to third to fourth in quick, practiced succession. "We shouldn't have left her there."

"I thought she'd follow us!"

"And you didn't say anything when she didn't?!"

"It was her decision to make! She didn't want to go with her own brother, for fuck's sake!"

Matanzas is growing larger and larger with each breath they take; Seth is clearly not doing to speed limit, though numbers like that have never mattered to him.

"One of us should have offered." And then, quieter, "I should have offered."

The ghost town looms before them, quiet and desolate. It's funny, Seth thinks, to know that there's only one person alive amidst the rotting old wood and six inches of dust.

He turns off the car; they sit there in silence, listening to the radiator drip as it cools.

"Do you need me to hold your hand." Richie finally says, "or are you going to grow a pair and go get her? I'd go myself but, uh. Sunlight. And I'm tired."

"Really, Richard? You're tired?"

"Hey! Hell and back, remember?"

He raises a hand, slams it back down on the steering wheel halfheartedly. He doesn't have much in the way of arguments, not right now, not after everything they've been through in the past few months—hell, past few hours.

Instead of answering Richie, he shoulders the door open and slams it shut behind him, cutting off any kind of parting riposte his brother might think up.

The air is already oppressive at this hour of the morning, and he can feel the dirt and blood and sweat caked on his clothes and skin solidify a bit more under the Texas sun.

It's a simple matter of retracing his steps, taken less than ten minutes before, to find Kate Fuller. But he goes slowly, events of the previous twenty four hours catching up with him, weighing down him bones. The heat might be part of it, too.

The town has gone silent again, nothing but a stiff, humid breeze kicking up dust around him and breezing through ancient broken windows, whistling through the spaces between the wood. There's blood still on the air, drying quickly, the hint of it just enough to make his stomach turn.

She's sitting on one of the dusty old porches in a strip of sunlight, face tilted up and eyes closed. The makeup Amaru had applied to her eyes is smudged, almost all the way up to her temple, like she tried to scrub it away with her hands.

He knows that there's things Amaru did to her, things Amaru made her body do, that can't just be scrubbed away.

Her hands are folded in her lap, fingers threaded together, like she was trying to pray but forgot how. Her hair, red tinged (blood, he thinks, unbidden), sits in clumps around her shoulders, humidity already doing it's work.

Seth clears his throat, and she jumps, shoulder's stiffening and hands going into fists. Kate relaxes a bit once she catches sight of him, hands uncurling , all of the fight draining out of her body at once.

They stare at each other, the silence between them a tangible thing. He thought, even as he had turned the car around and come back for her, that he would know exactly what to say. That he would find here, sitting here in Matanzas, and just tell her to get in the car—a Mexican Honeymoon Part II, almost.

"You want some company?" he asks, and suddenly it feels like they're covered in blood and standing outside of the Titty Twister again, a lifetime of bad decisions ahead of them.

But she smiles at him, fully and almost bright "Yeah."

It's an hour and eighty miles later that Richie finally says, "Seth said we forgot you. Like we left you at a Target or something."

And Kate laughs, quiet under the roar of the car.

Seth focuses on driving, los tres Geckoes riding off into the sunset, these precious few moments like the freeze frame end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

cross posted on ao3 forever ago.