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There is blood under his nails.
They’ve cleaned his face, closed his eyes, left behind the pale, peaceful husk of a man that barely even resembles his friend, the placid smile they massaged his face into all wrong on those handsome features.
His hair is tied away neatly with the ribbon Carlos gave him years ago, stray hairs brushed out of his face by a gentle hand that tucked the loose fringe behind an ear. Maria, no doubt.
He’s wearing a white shirt, which doesn’t suit him in the slightest. It fits wrong around the shoulders, makes him look oddly frail, strangely small.
Though Juan was never a tall man, he’d never once looked small, not even bleeding on the floor after a fight (any fight, before that last one), lips and teeth stained red, but on his feet again in a moment, ready to punch whomever had knocked him down. The Juan from Carlos’ memories would have gotten up, after he went down that day. The Juan from Carlos’ memories is always a little bloody. A smudge on his nose, a stain on his jacket.
The ill-fitting white shirt they’ve put him in somehow shows not a shred of evidence of the devastating injuries below, the blood pooling in the bandages. No red stain in sight.
Except that blood under his nails. There isn’t much. They’ve clearly cleaned his hands. But Carlos has seen enough blood on Juan’s hands to know what he’s looking at, to recognise the ruddy discolouration of the nailbeds, the darkness hiding below the jagged edges of the nails he would never stop biting when he was nervous, when he was scared.
There was blood under Juan’s nails the day they met.
~
He cries, the day they leave Cádiz. He’s eight years old and he has to leave his entire life behind and move in with his mother’s family in Sevilla. He cries and begs and hides in his childhood bedroom, but his father is dead and they can’t afford to stay in their villa by the sea, and his mother yells at him to pack his books and move before she makes him, so he does.
He hates Sevilla, a little, just for not being Cádiz, for not lulling him to sleep at night with the sound of the waves or the seagulls flying overhead. For having church bells that don’t sound the same and air that smells different. He misses the salt on his tongue, the sound of the ships in the harbour, he misses his father’s strong grip as he swung Carlos onto his shoulders every time he came home.
When he finally goes to his new school for the first time, he decides he doesn’t really want to make new friends. He had friends in Cádiz, people that understood that to him friendship isn’t learning to fence together or chasing cats across the square, but that it’s sitting quietly by the water with a book, or helping out in church together after mass. He doesn’t want to have to find people that understand again, and he doesn’t trust the boys here as far as he can throw them.
They’re all so loud, the boys in Sevilla. So loud and so rowdy, and he doesn’t really want to bother so he usually just sits in the corner of the schoolyard with a book. Nobody bothers him, anymore. They did the first week, because boys that read in a corner must obviously have something wrong with them and they’d wanted to make sure he knew that, but Carlos is tall enough, strong enough, that they’d only tried it once.
He might not like fighting, that doesn’t mean he isn’t good at it.
So now they leave him alone with his books, which suits him just fine. They all seem terrible, anyway.
This is confirmed during his second week at school, when a boy he hasn’t seen before joins the class. He’s short, so small that Carlos wonders if he should be in this class at all, and he is beautiful.
(He knows that he shouldn’t think other boys are beautiful. He does. But that doesn’t make it any less true.)
He, unfortunately, also looks as miserable as Carlos feels. The other boys whisper, when he enters, and Carlos catches the words ‘back’ and ‘funeral’. He wonders who it is this boy has lost, feels a strange sort of kinship with this other, unfamiliar soul in the room, with whom he shares something he wouldn’t wish on anyone.
The beautiful boy is quiet, fiddling with a rosary in his corner of the classroom and frowning, but when he is called upon his voice is strong and certain, warm and bell-like, to Carlos’ ears. For the first time since the move, Carlos feels the urge to talk to someone.
During break, just as Carlos is ready to sink back into another story and pretend he’s still back home by the sea, the jeering starts. At first he ignores it, determined not to engage with the stupid games his classmates have come up with this time, until he hears the soft, warm voice from class, full of anger and disdain.
He looks up, only to find the beautiful boy on the ground, with a split lip and blood on his knuckles, and one of the other boys looming over him. He jumps back on his feet and punches the larger boy, only to be thrown down again. Carlos winces in sympathy as he hits the pavement, spots the angry tears in his eyes. Unlike Carlos, this boy isn’t big. Isn’t strong.
He closes his book and gets to his feet, and when the other, older boy starts to throw another punch, Carlos is there to catch it.
“Leave him alone,” he says, anger bubbling up from deep inside, as he keeps a firm hold on the bully’s fist. He gets spit in his face for his trouble. As he wipes it off with a sleeve, he hears the boy behind him scramble to his feet again. Around them, the other children continue to jeer, but none of them approach.
“Oh, I should have known, the weirdo is standing up for the freak! Get lost little Carlos, or you’re getting it too.”
“No,” says Carlos, and twists the bully’s arm behind his back before shoving him away, “I don’t think I will. I think you’re going to leave us alone now.”
The bully scowls and raises a hand, but Carlos is faster; he punches the bully right in the nose, and watches impassively as he crumples to the ground, crying.
“I told you to leave us alone.” He says, just to drive the point home.
The bully, now red in the face, scoffs and glares, but turns around to walk away. Carlos glares after him, glares at the other boys surrounding them, until everyone but the beautiful boy is gone.
“Are you okay?” He asks, making sure to keep his voice low and gentle, in case the other boy got a scare, but when Carlos meets his eyes, there is nothing but fury to be found.
“I’m fine. You didn’t need to do that.” The boy says, wiping the blood off his face with a sleeve.
“He deserved it.” Says Carlos, carefully. The boy looks at him for a moment longer, then nods.
“He did.” He says, and holds out his hand. “My name is Juan.”
“I’m Carlos.” Says Carlos, and shakes it. There is blood under Juan’s nails, on his fingertips. When they let go, there’s a red smear across Carlos’ palm. “We should be friends.”
~
Carlos reaches out and gently, carefully, takes Juan’s hand into his own, feels the familiar calluses under his fingers, the rough edge of a torn nail on his palm. Juan has always had beautiful hands, gentle hands, when he wanted to. They feel the same in his as they always have; fit perfectly into his hold.
He closes his eyes, knees buckling, and lets himself sink to the ground, press his forehead against the back of Juan’s cold hand, feel the echo of his fingers slip into his hair, mess up his ponytail, tug teasingly at his bangs. Juan’s hands had always been warm, had always been gentle with him, even when he was shoving Carlos away, dragging him close, even when he was angry with him. His sharp, jagged nails had never scratched, never hurt him like they’d hurt so many others.
(But did that really matter, when he had been so willing to hurt Carlos in so many other ways.)
Tears spill down his cheeks, wetting the perfectly white sleeve of that perfectly, awfully, white shirt. Juan would have hated it. Would never have let them dress him in something so angelic as they have. It makes him want to scream, to shake Don Luis and ask him if he’d even known his son at all. But he can’t.
What right does he have, in the face of Juan’s father. Juan’s wife.
He’s nothing, in the grand scheme of things. Barely even a friend.
He forces himself to his feet, wiping his tears away with the back of his hand, and reaches into his pocket for a handkerchief. Carefully, gently, he takes each of Juan’s hands in turn and cleans the blood from underneath his nails, before folding them over his heart and tucking a single rose into his cold, stiff hands.
Something stings, as he pulls his hand away, scratching his skin as he presses a single kiss to Juan’s brow.
When he pulls away, there is a red smear across his palm, and blood under Juan's nails.